Global Education

Gates Argues World Governments Now Have a Choice

2012-01-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates in his Annual letter believes that the issue confronting the world is mainly about the perception that development aid is wasted whereas in fact it has produced some remarkable results in recent years.

"Right now, just over 1 billion people—about 15 percent of the people in the world—live in extreme poverty. On most days, they worry about whether their family will have enough food to eat. There is irony in this, since most of them live and work on farms. The problem is that their farms, which tend to be just a couple acres in size, don’t produce enough food for a family to live on.
Fifteen percent of the world in extreme poverty actually represents a big improvement. Fifty years ago, about 40 percent of the global population was poor. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, in what is called the “Green Revolution,” Norman Borlaug and other researchers created new seed varieties for rice, wheat, and maize (corn) that helped many farmers vastly improve their yields. In some places, like East Asia, food intake went up by as much as 50 percent. Globally, the price of wheat dropped by two-thirds. These changes saved countless lives and helped nations develop."

Governments are hesitant about maintaining a 1 percent commitment to foreign aid

"The world faces a clear choice. If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don’t, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation. My annual letter this year is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.
My concern is not only about farming; it applies to all the areas of global development and global health in which we work. Using the latest tools—seeds, vaccines, AIDS drugs, and contraceptives, for example—we have made impressive progress. However, if we don’t make these success stories widely known, we won’t generate the funding commitments needed to maintain progress and save lives. At stake are the future prospects of one billion human beings."

It comes down to educating the people in each country and whose business is it to help move that forward. But there is also a Spanish prisoner problem here--that it is in everyone's interest for countries to act in unison to fight deprivation and hunger but it is no country's single interest. How do we get out of that connundrum I wonder? Who is fighting for the common good of the world? Or for the world's poorest?

Hungary and the Perils of Super Nationalists

2012-01-24T12:50:00.000-08:00

In a recent New York Times op ed, Gyorgy Konrad reminds us about how quickly, even in our modern post Nazi German era, nationalistic politicians can move to uproot fundamental pillars of democracy.

Viktor Orban the prime minister has replaced the Hungarian Constitution with what he calls Basic Law. What asks Konrad is the point of this "crafty text"? Quite simple, he responds, "It aims to ensure that his rule is as lasting as that of the quasi-fascist Miklos Horthy, from the 1920s to the 1940s, or that of the communist Janos Kadar, who took over after the 1956 revolution and ruled until 1988.

Gone now are intellectual freedoms and "our only independent radio station, with hundreds of thousands of listeners — on a trumped-up pretext. Some of its shows were critical of the government."

Listening to the Republican nominee attacks on the "media elite" and their ultra patriotism suggests that there is a similar lurking desire to move in the Hungarian direction.

The Greek Crisis: Austerity is Not Working. Is anyone listening?

2012-01-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

In answer to the question does austerity work you only have to look at the Greek crisis and discover the dismal news. In one word No--in fact it makes this short sighted policymakes things worse--much worse. Take a look at the Washington Post report today:

Unemployment has surged to 18.8 percent from 13.3 percent only a year ago. Overburdened public hospitals are facing acute shortages of everything from syringes to bandages because of budget cuts, with hiring freezes forcing the mothballing of operating rooms even as more unemployed are relying on the public health system. Rates of homelessness, suicide, crime and HIV cases from intravenous drug use are jumping."

There is more:

“Conditions have deteriorated so dramatically that doctors in this country now believe that the Greek crisis is no longer just a financial crisis but a humanitarian crisis,” said Dimitris Varnavas, the president of the Federation of Greek Hospital Doctors’ Unions.

Is anyone listening? No. Certainly not the Germans who now control the fate of the Greek people--they want more suffering:

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy turned up the heat on Greece, suggesting that its bailout deal is in danger of unraveling if Athens does not press ahead quicker with pledged budget reforms and seal a deal with bondholders to voluntarily restructure its massive debt. But they also acknowledged that new steps are needed to combat slowing growth in the euro zone, where economists fear a looming regional recession as other indebted nations from Italy to Spain to Ireland also make deep spending cuts to reassure worried investors.

To the people who like to blame the victim--it appears from the Wall Street Journal's evidence that the Greeks work harder than the Germans and the Americans

The most recent data from the OECD covers 2008 and shows that in that year, Greek workers on average worked 48% more than their industrious German neighbors. The OECD data shows the average Greek worker spent 2120 hours at work compared with 1429 hours in Germany. Moreover, Greece is one of the only OECD countries in which workers were working longer in 2008 than in 1998. With 1802 hours at work, the average Italian employee spent more than 25% more time at work than the average German worker.

The question is as the Wall Street Journal reminds "is not the industriousness of the people, but the relative productivity of the economy, which derives from some structural issues that the people can’t help and some that maybe they can (unit labor costs, including those benefits that get people in Germany and the US all worked up). "How about a proper debate about what to do in these circumstances that does not end up causing long term damage to the people and country that you say you want to help.

Can the World Sustain Seven Billion People?

2012-01-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

It comes down to this. If we want to build a sustainable world with 7 billion people on the planet --emerging/developing economies will need to stop importing western lifestyles--becauseif they adopt our high energy (carbon consuming) lifestyle it just wont work. Homi Kharas a Brookings expertsays as much in a recent video/podcast interview but what is interesting is that there is no real interestin how to get that message across. Clearly the Indians and Chinese with their explosive growth and needto create huge middle classes in their countries in order to stay politically stable and avoid totalitarianextremes are not listening. We are not going to back away any time soon from our need to "strengthen the middleclass" and our desire to build more highways so we can buy more fuel guzzling cars. Where is the discussion about this factthat unless we are serious about becoming a sustainable planet we are going to confront a huge ecological crisis?The politicians and the media seem interested only in catering to short term needs. Where are the world bodiesthe UN, the World Bank, other organizations to give us a global long term perspective on all this, where are the universitiesand think tanks?

Vaclav Havel's Legacy

2011-12-20T18:58:00.001-08:00

If there was someone who you could name most deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize and did not--it was former Czech premier Vaclav Havel. The tributes have been pouring in. Here was a man who stood up to the Soviet invaders and articulated why in clear terms why those who lived under totalitarian rule must find ways to resist. From his famous essay The Power of the Powerless,he pinpointed why everyone needs to resistwhat "above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the "human order," which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a new found inner relationship to other people and to the human community-these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go."These are words that can be applied to our times as well. The people who have driven our economy into the proverbial ditch and the government that stood by and allowed it to happen have contributed to the same kind of implosion of values that the totalitarian regimes were responsible for.Havel's remedy is the right one," In other words, the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love...For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?"

New Realities Demand New Politics

2011-11-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

As the planet hits the 7 billion mark and we, at least in the declining west, try to dig ourselves out of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s it is time to map a different view of the 21st century. We know that the economic shocks we have just experienced are just a foretaste of more rough weather to come. You don’t have to be a dyed in the wool pessimist to recognize that one more shift in the interest rates which are already at historic lows will mean ballooning deficits and years more of austerity.

There are no panglossian scenarios out there that serious economists believe will help dig us out of the hole we have created. As we look for great political leaders to inspire the national will to help lead us out of the morass it seems that not even the rhetorical skills of President Obama are equal to the job in a nation that seems more profoundly divided than ever before in its history.

What is the answer? We need a new politics--one that can rise to the challenge of the times. The good news is that this new politics is slowly emerging through the Occupy Movement. It has begun well--as a non violent protest about the unfairness of 1% of the population grabbing all the spoils at the expense of the 99% but where does it go is the question? We all have a duty to help figure this out and begin a national dialogue. They have started to suggest we need new ideas--there is now an open invitation to help develop the new ideas we need. We should be encouraged that ideas can come from anywhere and they can go viral in a matter of minutes. Oxfam for example, is leading a "massive movement of
of nonprofit organizations, green groups, trade unions, celebrities, religious leaders and politicians, all campaigning to push the financial sector to pay up and generate much-needed public funds. In Europe, this movement has gained political momentum, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both calling for this tax. But thus far, the Obama administration has blocked any progress. President Obama’s administration says it’s not ready to support a financial transaction tax in the US. But that doesn’t mean that it has to stand in the way of progress across Europe."
The Robin Hood Tax will come up for discussion next week in Cannes, France when leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies gather at the G20 Summit.
Ask President Obama to support European countries working to bring about this tiny tax. A small change for the banks could make a huge difference for the world.
Join with Oxfam, National Nurses United, the AFL-CIO, and other unions and organizations in an international day of action happening on November 3 in Washington, DC."
These are the kinds of activities that are now shaping the new politics. Our current system is
designed for short term compromise (national elections every two and four years) we are going to be floundering for a good deal longer, but it is time to ask ourselves whether the issues we face are more due to institutional failure than the usual culprit the media, money or hyperpartisanship, or a combination of all three. The simple matter is that institutions that served a purpose in the 20th century have to be rethought and in many cases redesigned for a new era. We are making some painful progress on some--the media most notably but not on others--most obviously our 19th century educational system and not very functional participatory democracy.

2011-10-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

So the news is that we are all alike! It is easy to mock the young--so earnest, so keen to make a difference, so terribly naive but I like photographer Adrian Fisk recent project to understand in more depth the lives of young Indian and Chinese people. Adrian "traveled 2,700 kilometers across China and India to discover that most young people are, in essence, exactly the same. Adrian who is 41 and lives in London, "wanted to find out what these young people thought," "If I found out what was in these people's minds, I figured I would get an idea of where our world is headed at this pivotal time."
Fisk wanted his project to be a voice for these young people that the rest of the world knew little about.

Click here to see the photos >

Visiting Occupy DC

2011-10-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

It was a kind of dreary overcast morning when quite by accident I found the Occupy DC camp--just a stone's throw (or molotov cocktail) from the Ronald Reagan building and about a half mile from the Capitol. It seemed like a sleepy place. A few people were moving around getting things to eat and drink and trying to look like this was all very normal-- but the vast majority were asleep it seemed inside their bright cocoons--waiting butterfly like to arise into a new dawn. Dare I say that the tents seemed to be very internally occupied--one tent was moving visibly over to another one which prompted a tourist to wisecrack so this is how they multiply themselves-- her companion rejoined, "a puppy tent." It seemed like this was a serious group of folk, with peace as their mantra. Everything seemed well thought out--a media tent, a food and drink tent and it would seem a strong personal improvement and education arm to the proceedings as well --if a set of assignments still posted alongside one of the tents seems anything to judge by:

You have to like the White House Phone number posted at the bottom right corner of the message board--like in case of an emergency-- phone home. There were at most only about 50 tents but everything clean and orderly with no sense that they will be leaving anytime soon. Stay posted.

Occupy Wall Street Speaks With One Voice.

2011-10-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the petition seems to be the first articulation of the mass anger that is driving the Occupy Wall Street Movement and is likely to be ignored by the media. It is worth reading in full as powerful statement that seeks to identify the corporate greed as the main enemy now "run" our government. "They" is used multiple times indicating that the forces maybe faceless but they act in concert as some kind of anti-human force. It is a disturbing wake up call for our politicians to heed and should promote the dialogue that will probably be again missing from the mainstream media. The latest reports as suggest the movement is spreading and becoming more self confident. It is self consciously a global movement as stated in the preamble;

"As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

In today's New York Times Joe Nocera notes that this economy is likely to stay the same for a while or get worse. It will not improve anytime soon as the well respected writers of the report Nocera refers to suggests. Sooner or later we will need the real debate we have been delaying for the last five years or longer about what kind of future we want--one full of empty promises, war and false bubbles or one about how we got to this place and the lessons learned to move us into the future.

Hopefully the Occupy Wall Street groups will play a major role in helping the media as well as our politicians to frame the right issues and involve less of the talking head pundits and more of the voices that are now out on the streets.

Great Confessions Series: US Leaders Woefully Ignorant of the World

2011-10-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

The latest comment by General McChrystal should come as no surprise to most of us that as the Guardian reports the US had a

'frighteningly simplistic' view of Afghanistan,

General who led Obama's 'surge' strategy says even now the military does not have the local knowledge to end the conflict--

"The US and Nato are only "50% of the way" towards achieving their goals in Afghanistan, he told the Council on Foreign Relations..."We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough. Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years." McChrystal led the Obama administration's "surge" strategy that started in 2009 and sent US troop levels in Afghanistan to more than 100,000. Widely acknowledged as a gifted military commander, he was forced to resign last year amid controversy over remarks he made to Rolling Stone magazine." No comment--thousands of lost lives later he tells us and guess who is not listening..the US media but out in the streets as the Washington Post reports--the growing protest movement that started in Wall Street is gathering momentumOne wonders whether this is all made up by the Onion newspaper or is it for real? How can we have been so casual and so ignorant? How can our leaders continue to be so? The protest against ignorance gathers apace.

Do we Really Need a Third Party To Turn this Ship Around? RFK's Example

2011-09-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have been reading The Last Campaign: Robert F Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America by Thurston Clarke and it has proved a good antidote to the despair in US politics that has revisited us since the tea party got going and Obama seemed to lose his voice and his willingness to fight. With the Arab Spring in danger of winding down and losing its nerve, and the double dip recession long feared poised to overtake Europe and the US, these are trying times for progressives. This is particularly the case for those who feel that part of the despair comes from losing faith with the current occupant in the White House.

Clarke's book reminds you that what we lost in 1968 when RFK was assassinated, was not just the death of a charismatic politician but the end of the a good deal of faith that the system is fixable. Here was a politician prepared to take political risks. RFK presented in his last campaign a stark contrast to our present era of poll driven politicians. That is why Obama's credentials were so appealing to many of us who wanted to actually believe in the slogan hope and change--here was a politician at last who was not beholden to the corporate interests who had the capability to lead rather than follow public opinion. Accordingly, you have to be sympathetic to those calling for a third party--Matt Miller, Tom Friedman and an assorted number of left leaning moderate and highly intelligent pundits have joined the cause. The democrats seem no longer able to express the views of either the middle class or the working class. Instead they seem like their Republican colleagues way too anxious to appease the monied interests. Matt Miller for instance calls out Obama for his latest feeble gestures in the light of a deeper recession than anyone predicted:

"Our president calls himself “a warrior for the middle class” because he’s campaigning for a plan that might add 2 million new jobs next year at a time when 25 million Americans who want full-time work can’t find it."

He is right. What Miller does not acknowledge is that just that pathetic effort will face a very uphill battle in Congress by Republicans intent on giving Obama zero legislative victories before the 2012 elections. Why Miller asks do we now have a politics where mutually assured destruction seems to be the aim with the casualities are us? Career politicians eager to spring board from a career in politics to somewhere else in the culture where non corporate viewpoints don't belong? Possibly. Miller offers "three reasons"

"First, both parties’ chief aim is to win elections, not solve problems. Second, both parties are prisoner to interest groups and ideological litmus tests that prevent them from blending the best of liberal and conservative thinking. Finally, neither party trusts us enough to lay out the facts and explain the steps we need to take to truly fix things."

All these are correct but the third one to me is the most salient. No one wants to tell the truth. Truth is such an over valued concept I can hear one of the pollsters saying those who are routinely trusted nowadays with "the messaging." Truth is dangerous--besides the politicians will argue--no one believes us anyway or trusts us to tell them-- so why even bother. Instead both parties spend millions of donated dollars on PR campaigns of the poll tested kind, to massage or in some cases hide the truth. If the message is too difficult, (usually difficulty means could not be translated into an easy to read bumper sticker) it gets dropped. This is hardly news to political observers with any degree of common sense but we have reached a stage in this country where the problems can no longer be so cleverly massaged by the media spin doctors or swept under the cliched carpet. They are serious and real and they have got that way precisely because the inability to even have a discussion about them. They are not that difficult--one percent of the population has become super rich at the expense of around 90 percent of Americans. The role politicians interested in truth telling have to play is to let people know that this is the economy that third world countries have--an elite untouchable upper class with an insignificant middle and the rest of us who beg for bread crumbs from the rich. Such societies are fundamentally unstable, prone to violence and even revolution and seriously tragic places. A third party--is unlikely to change this because the underestimate the staying power of interests that are interested in creating a banana republic have played the game too long to give up to defectors from the white liberal elites who think they are especially gifted communicators. This is not about honing a message--it is about who has raw power and who can use it. It is also about having a leaders who can lead. One of the great disappointments with regard to Obama is that he had the power from those of us who gave him money so we would precisely avoid the spot he seems to have placed himself in the sense that he "owes something" to special(monied) interests. Instead of being busy forming third parties which takes a ridiculous amount of effort and time and has made more mischief for democratic progressives (think Nader) than it has helped. You need another hint--if Nader had not been on the ballot Gore would have been rightfully elected without a question and we would have avoided Iraq and the fiscal meltdown. Our focus should be on asking Obama to live up to his promises of not playing politics as usual, not playing a different role in government than when he was outside its walls. For the model he should turn to RFK 's last campaign. Constantly people questioned RFK's sincerity but Clarke's book shows that the passion for change was genuine and the evidence that he meant what he said was real. If you watch any of the footage from the campaign --including the above-- you can see there is a deep recognition that the world of 1968 needed to change from feeding a military industrial complex to one that served the poor and the marginalized. Reading Clarke's book you have a pretty good sense of the man's real desire for the country to change course and his willingness to take huge personal risks to make that happen. It was RFK's willingness to take risks that made the difference in 1968--his willingness to say things others seemed incapable of saying and his ability to empathize and analyze.

If RFK's memory means anything it should shame the mainstream media to stop playing into the sound bite culture that allows politicians to wiggle off the hook as they spout a phrase or two and do not receive follow up questions. More than anything RFK should re-inspire the play it safe democrats to stand up and lead rather than follow and that includes the pundits calling for a third party.

World at a Tipping Point

2011-08-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

While this extra hot summer appears to be adding to the problem it can feel some days as though we are all losing our senses. Maybe it is the heat-maybe it is living in Washington but the US seems right now to reflect the world's self destructive mood as its leaders failed to rise to the challenge of the time and focus on the right issues--job creation and not short term deficit reduction. Perhaps it takes an outsider like former PM Gordon Brown writing an op ed in the Washington Post to nail just how bad the latest US debt deal was:

"At the core of Washington’s debt decision last week were four “no-go” areas for policy: no more taxes, no more stimulus, no more public investment and no more cuts or increases in entitlement spending. Under these politically imposed constraints, growth from consumer spending and public investment is blocked off. With little chance of private-sector investment in a stagnant home market, America has locked itself into a low-growth cycle for years to come."

We did it to ourselves and now the only hope for the global recovery--that stands in the way of the double dip recession that the debt crazed Republicans seem to have welcomed with their threats of bringing about default if their demands were not met (is this is the only strategy they can come up with to defeat Obama in 2012 one wonders?)
Gordon Brown's solution is --"to export our way to growth"--which is exactly the strategy of every other country--in the world--including China, Germany, and the rest. We cannot all export without someone importing all the stuff we produce and that is why Brown hangs his hopes on the G-20 meeting later in the year coming out with some kind of grand bargain, but:

".. without a grand plan, the “export or die” strategies look like a zero-sum game..Is it possible to find a pathway to balanced, sustainable growth in a world that cannot sign a global trade agreement or a climate-change agreement (despite the fact that it would have stimulated billions of trade in renewables) and where the instincts of protectionism and nationalism are far more powerful forces than the imperative for global cooperation?"

We have to hope that the world that has been driven near to the brink by greedy bankers and their aiders and abetters among the political class will finally come to their senses. The media has to stop playing court to spin doctors and rise to the challenge of explaining to people the stakes since the politicians seem incapable of even telling simple truths that tax cuts will not do anything to create the new jobs we need in the quantity we need them and that taxing billionaires at a rate above the level that their secretaries pay is not some form of class war but a reasonable effort to create a fairer and more equal society. But as long as the media paints these ideas as extreme we will not make much progress. At some point we all need to focus on the real issues that long term unemployment and the sense of hopelessness among the youth is far worse than any short run deficit as it undermines social stability. You don't have to take a look at the London riots for examples just take a tour around any major or minor American city in the mid west's rust belt and you can see the devastation this kind of economy takes on people's lives and hopes. Let's hope that we come to our senses before it is too late.

In the Post Murdoch Era: Time to Uncover Some of the Real Scandals

2011-08-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

Why cannot we get a press that is fair to the most vulnerable in the world instead of one that protects the interests of the most powerful? The answer is that we can and those that know where to look for good, well sourced news can find it--but it sometimes takes digging.

I want to start a campaign today to see if we can aggregate the best sources around the globe that do the kind of fearless reporting that seems to have gone out of vogue in the 24 hour news world we currently inhabit--that elevates pseudo crises and nonsensical celebrity gossip while missing the real story over and over --here is my start at a list.

Greg Palast--just an extract today with his usual biting critique
of the Republican hostage takers and the fate of the Obama presidency:

"It was quite upsetting to find our President blindfolded and tied to a chair at the GOP Tea Party headquarters, but I'm sure the $2.2 trillion ransom we paid to the hostage-takers is worth it.

Well, now that the Obama presidency is over, we can move on to more serious matters.

Look out your window. What you'll see is that, while the debt-ceiling hostage crisis played out on cable TV, the planet has been burning down."

How is that for an intro that will never appear on any front or back page anywhere in the western press.

Stuff that never makes it to the bloated and now corporate minded Huffington Post--for example---

Reid is already upset that Republican leaders have declared that they will not appoint anyone to the joint committee who backs any tax hike, a virtual replay of the spending cuts vs. new tax revenues fight that consumed Washington for the past several months.

"So what does that leave the committee to do?" Reid said. "Should Pelosi and I just not appoint and walk away?"

If you want to find out why the next election will be fought on ground that the plutocrats expect to win on (hint it is not jobs) read Firedog Lake

Pro-Romney Super PAC Gets $1 Million from a Dummy Company
By: Jon Walker Thursday August 4, 2011 12:00 pm

pocketed (photo: Psychonaught)

"This is a frig From MSNBC:

A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The existence of the million-dollar donation — as gleaned from campaign and corporate records obtained by NBC News — provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system.

[...]

The corporate records provide no information about the owner of the firm, its address or its type of business.

If you ever wonder why in our “democracy” Washington politicians seem so much more concerned about the desires of a few rich people instead of what regular people want you need look no farther. It takes money to run and win political office. Regular people can not afford to set up secret dummy corporations to funnel millions into efforts help politicians. On the other hand a single rich person can. This is exactly why politicians spend so much time trying to make a relatively few rich happy."

and if you want to find out what is going on in the world of green energy read Ethan Goffman a contributor to E Magazine for some great analysis of prospects for renewable energy :

"With the Wikileaked news that Saudi Arabia may have overstated oil reserves by as much as 40%, speculation about peak oil has been rampant. Peak oil is the principle that once half of oil reserves are gone (the peak), scarcity will increase and prices rise as the remaining reserves become more difficult to reach. The result is more like a slow bleed than a sudden catastrophe—and the resulting record-high pump prices are already being felt..."

Media Ignores Main DSK/IMF Scandal --DSK's Management of the IMF

2011-05-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

International organizations are often stealth like in the way they tend to evade media scrutiny or seem subject to the kinds of accountability pressures that democratic organizations are often exposed to. In a way they behave more like large multinational too big to fail organizations of the kind that we heard a little too much from in our recent past --corporations like BP, Shell, Exxon, AIG, Goldman Sachs, we could go on of course. Among the NGOs that behave like this and clearly jump to the top of anyone's list is the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Both behave fairly inscrutably--their decisions of whether to sentence a country to hard "austerity measures"--or to put subtle and not so subtle pressures on political leaders to change policies are seldom reported. How they do their work is judged not very sexy despite their power (even beyond that of nation states) to control the fate of millions of lives. News editors tend to judge these stories as too complex to report or not very newsworthy.

Now because of the head of the IMF's alleged assault on a hotel maid we know a bit more about the person at the head of that particular totem pole but generally not much more. Although The New York Times recently reported that the IMF is not a particularly worker friendly environment with a large amount of what might best be called "alpha male behaviors" accepted by workers who are only too grateful to have a position at one of the world's most prestigious organizations--I have not found anything about the IMF's often disgraceful, frequently inhumane treatments of so called third world countries until reading Greg Palast's as usual timely and original reporting.

As Palast notes on Wednesday the New York Times ran " FIVE - stories on Strauss-Kahn, Director-General of the International Monetary Fund. According to the Paper of Record, the charges against "DSK," as he's known in France, are in "contradiction" to his "charm" and "accomplishments" at the IMF."

What Palast notes is that the alleged rape of the African housekeeper by the head of the IMF was preceeded by an actual rape of a country's economy from which she is from, Guinea:

"In 2002, the International Monetary Fund cut off capital inflows to this West African nation. Without the blessing of the International Monetary Fund, Guinea, which has up to half the world's raw material for aluminum, plus oil, uranium, diamonds and gold, could not borrow a dime to develop these resources.

The IMF's cut-off was, in effect, a foreclosure, and the nation choked and starved while sitting on its astonishing mineral wealth. As in the sub-prime mortgage foreclosures we see today, the IMF moved quickly to seize Guinea's property.

But the IMF did not seize this nation's riches for itself. Rather, it forced Guinea to sell off its resources to foreign corporations at prices much like the sale of furniture on the lawn of a foreclosed house.

The French, Americans, Canadians, Swiss (and lately, the Chinese) came in with spoons out and napkins tucked in under their chins, swallowing the nation's bauxite, gold and more. In the meantime, the IMF ordered the end of trade barriers and thereby ruined local small holders.

As a result of the IMF attack, Guineans who could, fled for freedom and food. This week, then, marked the second time this poor African was molested by the IMF."

Since taking over the IMF in 2007, erstwhile "Socialist" Strauss-Kahn has tightened the screws in an attempt to maintain the free-market finance mania that ruined this planet in the first place.

The disappointment is not just that the media chose not to cover this when Guine's wealth was about to be sacked when the world could have influenced the events and not just that it takes a sex scandal to generate any news at all about the IMF but now that the world's attention is turned to the IMF there is still no accountability regarding that institutions' nefarious ways.

Word Clouds Can Help us "Read" Political Speeches Such as Obama's most recent Middle East Statement

2011-05-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

The analysis is not in yet but these word maps can certainly help understand the deeper meanings and reflect on them.

Comments welcome..

Selective Moral Outrage in the Middle East --Our Media's Double Standards

2011-05-14T06:19:00.000-07:00

Hitler's atroticities were not believed by large segments in the west. Even the New York Times tucked away news that Jews were being gassed in their millions well inside the newspaper for fear they would be branded as a Jewish owned paper and lose their credibility as a reliably establishment organ. So with the Middle East. Robert Fisk the fearless Middle East reporter who writes for The Independent who never minds calling things as he sees them, writes that flagrant human rights abuses are taking place not just in Syria (the country like Libya that does not hesitate to fire on their own defenseless people) but also in the lands controlled by our old petro friends in the Gulf such as Bahrain and Saudia Arabia.

We are probably not aware of this because as Fisk writes the country is now being given a free pass in the human rights department.

Fisk for example notes that despite engaging in brutal tactics to quell dissent (with the help of their Saudi friends) without any real shock and disgust from the west. that
"On this tiny island, a Sunni monarchy, the al-Khalifas, rule a majority Shia population and have responded to democratic protests with death sentences, mass arrests, the imprisonment of doctors for letting patients die after protests and an "invitation" to Saudi forces to enter the country. They have also destroyed dozens of Shia mosques with all the thoroughness of a 9/11 pilot. But then, let's remember that most of the 9/11 killers were indeed Saudis."

Fisk comments on the near complete silence in the Western media concerning the systematic exercise of state sponsored brutality by Cameron-Clegg duo and of course Obama. All you really need to know why is contained in this one factoid as Fisk properly reminds us --Bahrain hosts the US Fifth Fleet -- and let us not forget
the three letter word "oil" that to paraphrase Bob Dylan does not just talk and swear it kills.

Why? Why is the west so pleased to wear the mantle of fearless first amendment proud free press exposer of the great and powerful so pathetic at reporting fairly the news that does not favor western interests? To wake them up here is a a graphic detail that Fisk reveals to wake them and us up to the kinds of brutality that is going in that benighted oil state. The military police walking into hospitals and charging of Shia Muslim doctors for "letting their patients die." This is Orwellian perversion of the truth would be Monty Python like funny if were not the truth -if we did not understand first that the patients the doctors were accused of murdering had already been shot by the "security forces." Fisk was actually "in the hospital when these patients were brought in. The doctors' reaction was horror mixed with fear – they had simply never seen such close-range gunshot wounds before." As Fisk reports "If this was happening in Damascus, Homs or Hama or Aleppo, the voices of CamerClegg, and Obama and La Clinton would be ringing in our ears. But no. Silence." Fisk reports "Four men have been sentenced to death for killing two Bahraini policemen. It was a closed military court. Their "confessions" were aired on television, Soviet-style. No word from CamerClegg or Obama or La Clinton.

We are also told in the same piece that "Even when Bahraini students in Britain are deprived of their grants because they protested outside their London embassy, we are silent. CamerClegg, shame on you." Media even more shame for your selective attention span. Fisk blames this all not so much on the Bahrainis oddly he feels the need to protect them by saying (it has nothing to do with the Bahrainis or the al-Khalifas. (nothing?!).."It is all about our fear of Saudi Arabia. Which also means it is about oil. It is about our absolute refusal to remember that 9/11 was committed largely by Saudis. It is about our refusal to remember that Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban, that Bin Laden was a Saudi, that the most cruel version of Islam comes from Saudi Arabia, the land of head-choppers and hand-cutters. It is about a conversation I had with a Bahraini official – a good and decent and honest man – in which I asked him why the Bahraini prime minister could not be elected by a majority Shia population. "The Saudis would never permit it," he said. Yes, our other friends. The Saudis. Don't blame this all on Saudi Arabia though Robert--blame it on the Bahrainis and also on us --their enablers--blame it on the politicians who won't own up to the fact as they righteously swear and reaffirm their fight against their "war against terrorism" (we will let go the fact that you cannot have war against a tactic--you can however confront an ideology and prevent its virus like spread). Let the war against our own media's wilful blindness and our polticians equal wilful hypocrisy first and then we might well be able to start a war against some of the extremist ideologies with some better hope of winning.

Obama's Dilemma in the Middle East: Trapped by a History of Failure

2011-04-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

The President can be criticized for playing an overly cautious hand with regard to the Middle East. Unlike the prior President he "does not shoot from the lip"--does not see the world in the John Wayne cowboy style of his predecessor. On the campaign trail he was anything but cautious calling for Afghanistan conflict as the right one and undermining his rival Hillary Clinton's decision to support the unpopular Iraq war begun, as we all now know,using falsified and misleading information. Obama seemed as if he knew what he was doing in the Middle East and could be trusted to steer the region towards peace, particularly when he gave his historic speech in Cairo. While stopping short of promoting democracy in Egypt he picked his words carefully to encourage those dedicated to change, living under the ossified dictatorial systems in that region to count on the US support, he spoke unequivocally that, "governments needed to "reflect the will of the people... Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere."

That was June 2009 and now, less than two years after that occasion we have seen uprisings first in Tunisia, and brutally put down in Iraq, and a second set taking place in Egypt Libya and now Syria. Reading Ryan Lizza's excellent piece in this week's New Yorker we see how difficult Obama found it to commit to backing the rebellions--most painfully in Iraq for fear of discrediting them as being perceived as US backed, but you have to wonder why the hesitation with regard to Egypt, Libya and Syria, where unarmed people were being slaughtered. Obama seems to want it both ways, as Lizza argues,

"Obama’s reluctance to articulate a grand synthesis has alienated both realists and idealists. “On issues like whether to intervene in Libya there’s really not a compromise and consensus,” Slaughter said. “You can’t be a little bit realist and a little bit democratic when deciding whether or not to stop a massacre.”
Where was the support he voiced in Cairo for human rights to be supported "everywhere."? During the time when we needed the staunch visionary Obama retreated back to his role as constitutional law professor, “When you start applying blanket policies on the complexities of the current world situation, you’re going to get yourself into trouble,” he said in a recent interview with NBC News. This troubling equivocation can be partly explained by Obama's not well concealed view that we are in danger of "imperial over stretch" as the Pentagon budget remains the only area of the budget to receive year on year increases as we continue to fight two wars. There was also concern that is best expressed by the phrase better the devil you know that the one you don't which had some play inside the corridors of power until the prime time news screens ran with the horror of unarmed people being mowed down in the streets by their own "people" dressed up as soldiers. It further needs to be pointed out that there is also a world weary recognition that the US public has been led down this road before and as health and educational budgets for all levels of government tighten and force many families to choose between between food and rent--there is a recognition that enough may well be enough in the area of foreign adventures. Obama trapped by his own soaring rhetoric is now tasked with figuring out the new role the US must play (even with trillions of dollars in deficit) in the world. The problem is that the rhetorical flourishes he does so well all are on the side of the grand not the cautious mode he prefers for day to day governing. Republicans in constant state of denial about anything except the need to cut government spending and no tax increases (especially for the wealthy) have a blind spot for military spending and for the US former glory. They will have no hesitation in trying to pick apart what they perceive as Obama's lack of 'gung ho' patriotic war like spirit even as we seek to extricate ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan on terms that might appear to the many who gave their lives for their country and the cause of peace, as "dignified."

Educators Need to Respond to a Changed World

2011-04-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have been traveling in Turkey this past month and while there had a chance to think through the issues the world is suffering which might be characterized as "a highly stressful period" here are just a few items:

• Japanese Earthquake /Tsunami
• Nuclear Power Plant melt down
• Libyan uprising
• Ivory Coast uprising
• Syrian crackdown

Apart from the usual worries about higher inflation, oil prices and general instability of the US and most of the European economies teetering on a double dip recession—we have got to wonder whether this is going to be the pattern for a while—just a general increased turbulence. Continuing with the turbulence metaphor the question arises-- is this like flying through a stretch of 'bumpy air' or is this is going to a fairly permanent state for the rest of the 21st century world-- a constant shift from crisis to crisis? My short prediction is yes—we are entering a period of extended crisis.

Two main factors seem to be driving this new semi-permanent state —our relentless pursuit of cheap energy, even at the expense of our own safety and the expanding thirst for democratic freedoms particularly from young people trapped in states whose rulers made a devils' bargain to provide cheap oil to the west in exchange for a lifelong grip on power. The comfortable part of the west --that receives most of its information through the corporate media --have cocooned ourselves in our nice cars and homes with the belief that there are few consequences for this state of affairs—we are lulled by infotainment shows and share (bolstered by the high tech gadgets we are so tempted to buy) an exaggerated belief that our ever expanding technology prowess will eventually resolve all problems favorably. What we are failing to recognize are two other very destabilizing factors- —a dramatic rise in population particularly within the Muslim world, and a new generation coming to maturity who lack the fear that virtually paralyzed their parents equipped with new tools of 21st century literacy and organizing--cell phones and facebook accounts together with improved English speaking ability. In Turkey 50% of the population is under 28 and there are similar numbers in the rest of the Middle East. In Turkey also many of these young people have moved to large cities like Istanbul (now over with a population of 13 million, also making (according to Wikipedia "the largest metropolitan city in Europe) believe they are entitled to a better future than their parents' generation. In the west we are good at reporting the daily headlines not as good at recognizing the big picture and how it has changed.

What are we to do? First admit that our institutions, particularly governmental and international bodies, educational and media organizations were built for a different world and are almost as overwhelmed with change as those Tepco Nuclear engineers who assumed they could deal with the emergency even though they well knew they had built the plant on one of the most active fault lines in the world— (the so called "ring of fire"). There had been no planning for a tsunami (a predictable outcome of an earthquake on the sea bed). We can expect more of the same kind of news reports we are currently receiving from Japan about other major areas as stories from once far away places such as the Middle East, Asia because of our globally interconnected world cause reverberations throughout societies that previously saw themselves as insulated affluent enclaves. These new stories have no neat endings--that begin with uncertainty and and end there too--a case in point today--they are flushing radioactive water into the oceans and polluting the air with the same poisionous smoke. Result? We are not told. These are the new 21st century news stories--narratives that follow no predictable curve. In the case of the Japanese Nuclear plant meltdown it is as if we were captive in a cinema watching an awful end of the world Stephen King movie but guess we are not--this is real. Our willingness to close off part of our minds to the reality is perhaps more evident with regards to the Middle East --did we honestly believe that dictators could exist in the same age as Facebook, Twitter and cellphones?

As educators we have some special responsibilities here too--to point out where the prevailing assumptions no longer match current realities and to not provide our students with easy answers--how ever tempting--but with a series of questions that we all have to confront about the world we have so comfortably remained closed to for too long. More about this set of new 21st century challenges in subsequent blogs.

Exploding Narratives -We Need to Learn the Lessons from the Latest Middle East Crisis

2011-03-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

Many commentators have made several points concerning how limited our perspective on the Middle East has been prior to the recent uprisings. As far as some were concerned it was all about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of Iran as a menace in the region. Of course there was more to the story but since journalists were not provided easy access in the countries that are exploding we now know differently-- the question that was not really on the table to answer was the brutal scale of the repression that existed in countries like Egypt as well as Libya along with many other so called "moderate regimes." What was also largely hidden from public view is the way western governments particularly those of the US and the UK and out of office leaders were all too willing to make deals with tyrants and brutal dictators to preserve these cruel regimes and more painfully for self gain. This was a massively under-reported story. Now the media feel free to spill the beans, or at least some of the more palatable ones. Some recent examples include:

o Philip Stephens writing in the Financial Times makes the point it was one thing for Tony Blair to want to encourage Col. Gaddafi to join the fold of nations that did not want to trade with terrorists etc etc., it was quite another for Blair to go cap in hand to represent UK arms companies in Libya to scoop up some lucrative deals.

o The case of the departing London School of Economics (LSE) Director who had to resign--having been caught out by his energetic efforts to take donations from anyone it would seem with a checkbook and a desire to wash their reputations clean is another example of this ethical grey zone behavior.

And Nick Cohen writing in The Guardian starts off provocatively by stating that "The Arab revolution is consigning skip-loads of articles, books and speeches about the Middle East to the dustbin of history. In a few months, readers will go through libraries or newspaper archives and wonder how so many who claimed expert knowledge could have turned their eyes from tyranny and its consequences. To a generation of politically active if not morally consistent campaigners, the Middle East has meant Israel and only Israel. In theory, they should have been able to stick by universal principles and support a just settlement for the Palestinians while opposing the dictators who kept Arabs subjugated.

The right has been no better than the liberal-left in its Jewish obsessions. The briefest reading of Conservative newspapers shows that at all times their first concern about political changes in the Middle East is how they affect Israel. For both sides, the lives of hundreds of millions of Arabs, Berbers and Kurds who were not involved in the conflict could be forgotten..:

• Gaddafi was so frightened of a coup that he kept the Libyan army small and ill-equipped and hired mercenaries and paramilitary "special forces" he could count on to slaughter the civilian population when required.

• Leila Ben Ali, the wife of the Tunisian president, was a preposterously extravagant figure, who all but begged foreign correspondents to write about her rapacious pursuit of wealth. Only when Tunisians rose up did journalists stir themselves to tell their readers how she had pushed the populace to revolt by combining the least appealing traits of Imelda Marcos and Marie-Antoinette."

We also learn from Dominic Kennedy writing in the Sunday Times that one powerful source for the boycott of Israel came from the influence peddling Libya was able to exert through their contacts with the LSE. If the allegations are proved it will another blow for the reputation of the LSE.

These stories can come out now and only just because Stephens (see above FT article) argues the all encompassing power of Britains' antiquated libel laws has to take much of the responsibility for the failure of the British media to go after those who would aide and abet brutally repress their own people.

"The media has been muzzled. To dig deep into the dealings of peripatetic billionaires and foreign despots is to invite instant legal challenge. The (libel) law demands journalists provide absolute proof of dubious dealings. That’s hard to find in the wild west of the former Soviet Union or the closed world of Middle Eastern autocrats. So, in spite of the occasional bouts of indignation, Britain shrugs its shoulders and gets on with the washing. Depressing really. Then again, it pays well."

The problem with Stephens' argument is that the US and the western press in general felt no real compunction to tell the truth either. Anne Applebaum reciting a similar sorry saga in Slate recounts a similar sorry saga of the rich and near rich like Prince Andrew, Blair and a whole host of the aspiring super lawyers and lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic and makes an effort to draw out the lesson. Applebaum's piece is worth reading in its entiriety as it dares to name names and recounts in some graphic detail who dined and groveled at the knees of despiscable people like Gaddafi's son,

"If Western governments want to have any credibility at all in the post-revolutionary Arab world, they need to stop hiring people, even as "envoys," who are already in the pay of current or former Arab dictators. Blair should resign immediately from his role as an informal negotiator in the Middle East; Prince Andrew should be told to stay home. The Wisners of the world should be sent back into retirement. Finally, for good measure, the legions of former public officials now in the pay of Chinese, Russian, or Saudi businessmen should be kept far away from their previous places of employment, just in case. Come the revolution, you can be sure they will turn out to have embarrassing friends, too."

Plenty to ponder here about the relationship of powerful leaders, staggering personal wealth and the political and media elite. None of this items taken individually shocks but collectively it adds up to a disturbing picture. We have always had a set of hypocritical western leaders and their hacks who are all too ready to cash in their influence and sell out to the highest bidder. It is the lack of media interest in all this that is truly disturbing. Is it that the popular media has caved into cynicism? The disastrous nature of media monopolies and their role in framing news stories that support only certain narratives that are commonly pedaled, pundit supported and while not always inaccurate leave too much out so much in fact that we are left with half truths and a deeply distorted global picture. How do teachers correct for this?
Certainly by acknowledging the notion of how story framing works and how while it is convenient for editors to run with known frames and narratives -- they need to check-in with reality once in a while--because once in a while if you don't --well need I say more...This is not all bad--certainly for journalists..refreshing in fact--but maybe not so good for the rest of us and clearly not a good basis on which to frame long term foreign policy decisions. We could prepare better for all this if as Thomas Friedman so brilliantly said in a recent column. "we had not built our house at the bottom of a volcano!"

Tiger Mothers and the Debate about Our Future

2011-03-02T06:43:00.000-08:00

I have followed the Tiger Mother debate with some interest. Since reading the article in the Wall Street Journal I have been discussing the article with a wide range of people including family members. Yes Chua is correct regarding the key point that you cannot enjoy a discipline such as being a musician until you really master it--and it is too easy to give up because getting to that mastery level takes an enormous amount of work and yes American parents in particular maybe a little too quick to say OK--as they multi-task to cope with the increasingly frenetic pace of life.
But the key issue as one writer points out in her "Tiger Mothers and Superficial Scholars" blog is what kind of spark and inspiration you can provide the student to want to practice and come out of the end of the experience with something fresh and illuminating to express. If a student is forced to do something because love might be instantly withdrawn that as Pardoe persuasively argues in her blog is an unacceptable emotional abuse. What Chua asks us to believe is that kind of abuse produces musicians etc, and well it might develop a few who can survive that type of treatment--but what is more likely is that the majority who now will be even more subject to those kinds of regimes will have to pay the price of forever struggling to find their true voice (think why the "King's Speech" swept all those Oscars the other night--it was a universal story --in one way shape or form of human potential to express itself being damaged and thwarted) as they struggle constantly for approval and to conform to others expectations. The serious and often forgotten point about education is that it derives from the Latin word --"to lead out"--leading not forcing out--helping to structure experiences that nurture the desire to move out of confined spaces--and limited explanations. In this matter both cultures --(forgive the sweeping generalizations but you can't seem to play in this debate without the use of the those all encompassing constructs) may have something to learn. The American K-12 school culture seems caught now in a sort of "Tiger Mother Moment"--believing that only the knowledge that can be tested is worthwhile and focusing on that low level set of skills is the way we need to focus on a systemwide level. The Chinese as they look to the west for some of the ways that they can now begin to develop their own big global brand names (can you think of any one Chinese brand name that has any kind of global resonance?) want to do more to encourage the creativity and innovativeness of a Bill Gates and a Brin who made Microsoft and Google world wide names in the 80s and 90s respectively. These should not be idle speculations --the new knowledge economy --if we truly believe there is reality behind the rhetoric will come from thinkers who are not approval seekers and who have forged their own path--their own journey out--yes they mastered the basics, yes they were disciplined in their approach, but they had that spark to learn and grow at an astonshing rate on their terms in their way.

OK, We have a "Middle Eastern Teachable Moment"--Now What?

2011-02-22T11:51:00.000-08:00

As events in Libya continue to explode and the Middle East as a region seems to beginning a phase of historical turmoil and change we may well reflect on how this all beginning to play out in the classroom. To answer the question as to how are teachers responding to all this we now have Education Week's most recent article "U.S. Teachers Find 'Teachable Moment' in Egyptian Protests"

to turn to. While Michelle Anderson's piece is timely enough, it only provides us with a glimpse of what might be happening in classrooms across the US -- not yet a full enough pictureto draw any major conclusions. One theme seems to be the effort by teachers to connect the American revolution with the events in Egypt. The article makes us also very aware that the teaching of Middle East history is pretty sporadic. Anderson's reporting is also limited by the narrow range of quite privileged teachers she interviewed-- just those few who managed to attend a recent Harvard Forum with many who had had the additional benefit of having been widely traveled in the region. What most teachers seem to be doing was "connecting the uprising to historical events, such as the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Boston Tea Party." These kinds of lessons as valuable as they are in connecting students to the current events are probably the kinds of lessons that are going on throughout the US--in one shape or form --related to of course grade level and subject--one would hope across thousands of classrooms in the US. What is clearly of more value is whether teachers are able to use the event to sustain an interest in the Middle East and help connect them to more issues. How to do that? There do not seem any clear pathways at the moment --but it would be a missed opportunity if we were not able to take the further everyone's clear fascination with seeing the revolutionary events unfold in such stark detail on their TV sets. That kind of thing does not happen as they say every day or every generation. Getting to those deeper issues related to sustainable pathways and understanding further how cultural and media issues affect our understanding is of course a more complicated challenge. On a more optimistic note the task, as Anderson is careful to note, is made easier by sites like Brown University's Choices Program with the goal to "make complex international issues understandable and meaningful to high school students." Interestingly their offerings are not defined by grade level or subject area--the approach is simple and clear--the heading is "Teaching with the News" and the site just provides a range of tools from a very simple graphic organizer that helps students just recall key points from the video and other materials supplied to more challenging assignments. What is interesting and could be a valuable research strategy is what teachers want to do with the more advanced materials supplied --there is one for example that provides a series of interesting photos from the demonstration. Just deconstructing one would be a valuable experience (take the one below for example from a collection organized as a PowerPoint slide show on the resource page referenced above):

I suggest you expand the size of the picture by clicking on it to get a better view.

It does not seem at first blush we need a lot of cultural information to interpret the picture or do we?

1. What is the the cultural meaning of a woman dressed in a hijab protesting the government--(as the wikipedia entry on hijab indicates, in the colonial struggles in the past the hijab was a symbol of resistance not as it is often interpreted today in non Arab countries an indication of female subjugation?) Is this woman telling us something by wearing a hijab ? If so what is that message?
2. From the way that the sign seems so spontaneous using the remnants of an old ripped cardboard box- written with haste--was it something she decided to do on the spur of the moment or was this a more planned type of communication?
3. To what extent is the fashionable western style purse that hangs from her shoulder a clue to her more affluent life style and aspirations?
4. What is the significance of those black gloves? The way the gloves appear stretched over her skin suggest that these gloves are made of latex does this offer any clues? Perhaps after all this is a deeply religious woman who wants to ensure that every part of her skin is covered? or is so unused to street life that she is afraid of being contaminated from touching this very ragged piece of cardboard?
5. Who are the signs for? For Western eyes clearly --but notice too how she stands apart from the crowd. By firmly holding her sign up she reinforces the idea that she is keen to be observed and is aware that she needs to provide a different message for both of the cardboard folds--as they appear at different angles as if she is posing for a particular aerial mounted camera.

Where can you go to get information to help with this activity --surely libraries and the internet can help--but a key source would be people--people from the country itself who can help us understand more completely how common it might be to have a woman in full hibja protest in public? What is the risk to her? How representative is she of all women in Egypt or just certain segments? Students must themselves become like journalists and try to ferret this information out. It is the type of research that lends itself to the Web 2.0 tools that I refer to in my book Global Education: Using Technology to Bring the World to Your Students. These types of explorations maybe as important as connecting US historical events because they engage learners and as they do sharpen their cultural, media and visual literacy.
It takes some effort to organize but not a huge amount and once you do it the first time you may never look back. Liberation (particularly from a way of doing business that no longer makes any sense) comes in many forms.

Advice to Young People Wanting to Make a Global Difference

2011-02-16T19:06:00.000-08:00

Advice to young people is always a bit difficult. Who knows what worked for us will work for others? But it is a risk worth taking when so many media influences suggest paths that are clearly not based on reality. We can think of the rather sad way so many young and minority children growing up in the inner city aspire to be sports stars and don't understand the odds of them becoming the next Michael Jordan etc are only a bit higher than winning the lottery. But the lottery is what we play when we don't know what else to do to improve our lives. Better to listen instead to some wise and experienced voices and hear what they have to say and don't necessarily follow them but compare their arguments with others and decide what is best for you. Here is Jeffrey Sachs advice to the more privileged amongst us that seems to make sense to me especially at this time in US history:

Reflecting on the Peace Corps' 50th Anniversary

2011-02-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

Among the institutions created during the heady days of the Kennedy administration, the Peace Corps still stands out as carrying the key signature tune of that idealistic and creative President, in a way that the Apollo moonshot never quite did. Although for rhetorical punch and iconic imagery the Peace Corps did not quite resonate with the American people in quite the same way as the moonshot, there are thousands of peace corps graduates who speak enthusiastically of their experiences and the program is still around today, while the moon remains a pretty empty place. In fact on March 1st this year the Peace Corps will celebrate its 50th anniversary and many more gallons of ink and tons of paper will be expended to figure out what this program means to us today. Here is my effort to make sense of it all at this half century mark based on an excellent New Yorker article, "Village Voice: The Peace Corps Brightest Hope", by Peter Hessler.

The Peace Corps mission was a whole lot more diffuse than the simply setting foot on lunar soil --the three goals encapsulated in the Peace Corps mission seem oddly antiquated even naive --a throw back to when American foreign policy motives were not as widely questioned as they are today:

" 1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans."

The awkward way the program sits as an underfunded throwback to a bygone era
is nowhere better captured than in Peter Hessler's account of a remarkable young man, Rajeev Goyal whose trajectory we follow from Peace Corps volunteer, to advocate to becoming a highly reflective global change agent, is wonderfully described in the way the best New Yorker essays allow. (You can be forgiven for overlooking this essay--I find my New Yorkers tend to pile up unread too frequently these days waiting for that right time to sit through all their often highly rewarding material. The right time rarely ever comes--but come it did this weekend.)

Rajeev is now only 31 but he seems to have lived a few lifetimes. Hessler describes him in an excellent phrase as having the "portable confidence of the second generation immigrant--no matter where he goes, he knows there are benefits to being an outsider." His family wanted him to study medicine but he volunteered instead for the Peace Corps and served in Eastern Nepal from 2001 to 2003. He was locally revered by the Nepalese villagers--because he figured out a way to bring water to a village two hours away from the nearest water source--requiring multiple trips across steep mountain paths carrying 16 litre jugs. Using amazing ingenuity in the way that he worked to design a new kind of water pump and single handedly raised the funds from family friends back in Long Island as well as a number of foundations. 535 people ended up volunteering for the project and amazed visiting engineers. When Rajeev went to lobby for Peace Corps after completing law school it had sat in the budgetary doldrums receiving just $342 million dollars in 2008 --the price of two F-22 fighter jets as Rajeev was quick to say. Hessler's story picks up speed when he describes the way Rajeev went to work in an effort to change this rather dismal funding picture. Hired by the National Peace Corps Association (not the Peace Corps itself which was not allowed to lobby for its own budget) Rajeev did not follow any typical lobbying protocol--he saw himself after all as a big time change and as with the Nepalese water project only"out of the box" thinking would do. He wanted always to go to the power source--to the people in charge--and approach them personally--all he needed was a way to connect. When he heard for example that Obama's half sister once "considered" joining the Peace Corps he found a way to fly to Hawaii and meet with her. He gathered letters not just from her--but from a wide range of famous Peace Corps alums in the media and in elective office. After memorizing the of Congressman and Senators he met them in Hill watering holes and found opportunities for friendly engagement.

Long story short-- Rajeev goes a bit too far in his highly personal lobbying. One of the people offended by Rajeev's personal button holing tactics was Senator Patrick Leahy who as custodian of the Senate appropriations committee was not happy with some of the tactics that included enlisting his father's hospice nurse and calls from Ben and Jerry of Vermont ice cream fame. So you could say that Rajeev went overboard on behalf of his cause-bringing up the question as to how far should you go in support of what you believe before it becomes counter productive? But the more important question raised by this article is whether there was a more fundamental reason why the Peace Corps was not able to attract more significant funding than Rajeev's flawed lobbying strategy?

To answer that question the reader needs to follow Rajeev's journey after he agrees it might be a good idea to give the lobbying a rest (after having raised the appropriation from $348 to a nice round $400 million, despite the Leahy missteps. Symptomatic of the deeper problem was the inability of a majority of Peace Corps volunteers to go to bat politically for the program. When Hessler talked to former Peace Corp volunteers they talk in terms of how much they got out of the experience--"I got so much more out of the experience than I gave" -is a typical sentiment. Congress reflecting a mood that overtook the political establishment soon after President Kennedy's assassination and President Johnson's Great Society program exhausted itself did not believe, to put it crudely, that babyboomers feeling better about themselves and their country was a good enough reason for expanding support. Congress wanted progress measured in standard development terms in the metrics of how many schools and hospitals the Peace Corps helped build, not that in 1966 the agency received 42,000 applications and 15,000 volunteers were working around the world. Construction projects were not the only place where the Peace Corps shined-- there were other parts of the budget (the State Departments' AID for example) that was dedicated to that sort of work. But how to describe what made the Peace Corps unique was harder than it first appeared even for Rajeev to pin down and might explain why Congress has had such a difficult time meeting the expectations of the Peace Corps community. As Hessler digs a bit deeper we recognize that maybe the reason can be found in Rajeev's willingness to see the negative side of what he accomplished in Nepal--for example the success of bringing water to the village brought in developers and the price of land started to rise --tenfold in a year--and locals were concerned that their village identity was going to disappear. Rajeev tells the author that he now believes that construction projects maybe "overvalued" and it is more important to spend time in a community as it moves forward not always support large projects and radical plans.

Hessler closes on an optimistic note however, with a scene where after a successful opening of an agricultural training building in Nepal for which he helped raise the funds, he declines in a meeting with a government minister to whole heartedly support for a full college college for the village saying we need to do "something different..something unusual." What Rajeev seems to be moving towards is interesting and seems a bit akin to the mood that made Avatar such a successful movie--it is a recognition concerning the necessarily highly complex nature of local culture and by extension local ecologies. In the 1960s when the Peace Corps was fashioned we barely knew how to talk about these things and 50 years later we are just on the verge of exploring and explaining what this will all mean to us, the Peace Corps and our world. Working in some kind of harmony with other cultures--rather than siding with an individual intent on suppressing expression seems to be one of the lessons we might take from our interactions with Egypt over the last 30 years. Several billion dollars later and many more F-22 jets purchased we might wonder what a more enterprising "different" and "unusual" approach might have looked like.

Making Learning Arabic More Difficult than It Should Be

2011-02-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

Surely we can all agree that learning a major world language like Arabic should be something we want to encourage our children to do--but we might pause a bit when we mandate it as one school district has reportedly done recently to great national outcry.

Now the right wing conspiracy theorists that believe there is some kind of federal government inspired plot will be all over this story. It may well be the fault of an over hasty school district that thought they could apply for a grant where they failed to gain approval of the parents ahead of time and just decided to submit and see what happened. The feds might have checked too before the grant was announced to ensure that they did have the approval of the parents. Cultural change is not easy to deal with and if it comes too fast and without much warning as it seems to have done in this Texas school district the results can be less than ideal. Hopefully the situation can be salvaged with some calming talk and ways that the exposure to Arabic langauge is not threatning but empowering.
It is a story worth following.

Many More Teachable Moments from Egyptian Crisis Than Meet the Eye

2011-02-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

We have seen this movie before--thousands march into the streets against a brutal or at least ruthless dictator and we stand by applauding while moderately and never obnoxiously patting ourselves on the back for our love of freedom and democracy that we celebrate and believe is a universal value and what happens? Many times the revolution is crushed and we go back (after an seemly silence and rebukes) to going back to the way things always were. This pattern of events maybe the last of these episodes if we can encourage ourselves and our media to look more deeply at the pattern. The US as David Rieff points out in his excellent piece for the New Republic. Since 1975 as Rieff points out the US has given $23 billion in Aid to Egypt and still the country ranks..

"According to the U.N. Human Development Index, .. one hundred and first, between Mongolia and Uzbekistan. In the context of the Arab Middle East, it ranks tenth, below not just rich countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but behind Libya, Jordan, and Algeria as well. According to Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations, over the past decade, Egypt has experienced rising income inequality while failing to address root poverty. Ordinary Egyptians, she writes, simply not feel they were “reaping the benefits of [their country’s economic] expansion.” Food prices are rising to levels not seen since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, a recent World Bank study showed that the higher educational system is doing a very poor job of producing qualified graduates, and, whatever their qualifications, unemployment among the young is well over 30 percent nationally. "

"Washington seems never to have believed that any quid pro quo should have been demanded in return for the $28 billion USAID provided over the past 36 years. And yet, there is absolutely no reason why successive U.S. administrations should not have made this assistance conditional on, say, a serious attempt by the Egyptian government to curb corruption. It is not as if Mubarak would have then said, “That’s it, I’m breaking ties with Israel, lifting the Egyptian blockade of Gaza, and seeking a rapprochement with the Iranians.”

As Rieff goes onto argue things are worse in Pakistan--another major receipient of aid:

"According to a report issued this January by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, more than four million people remain homeless six months after last year’s floods. And, in those regions, Islamist charities are often the only providers of medical services, shelter, and food that is not prohibitively expensive for most internally displaced people. And yet, while the U.S. government would certainly like to see something done (rather as it would have “liked” to see less corruption and torture in Egypt), it has not put anywhere near the pressure on the Pakistani government to alleviate these people’s suffering that it has in pushing Islamabad to escalate its military operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border. "

When we send money for weapons and where we gain influence over those governments as a consequence we should not be pressured by the military so that they believe that these funds are there's
to keep. Nor should we take the Orwellian lies that our government then tells us about the ways those funds are supposed to be helping the economy more broadly. Rieff refers in particular to the
'' the grotesque claim that “USAID has helped Egypt become a “success story in economic development.” More specifically, the site claims particular success in improving the quality of education, and, the administration of justice,” improved “access to justice for disadvantaged groups..”
The only response to that type of whitewash is quite simply "garbage."

However the final situation in Egypt turns out the teachable moments coming out of the crisis are many and need to be taken seriously after CNN and all the world's news crews depart the scene and we move onto the next crisis. Understanding this crisis in more detail might help in fact avoid the next one.

Egypt -Some hours ago: Pictures speak

2011-02-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

Christians surrounding Muslims at Prayer

What Makes for a Middle Eastern Revolution? Answer--Highly Educated Young People with Cell Phones and Few Opportunities

2011-01-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

Why did Egypt and before that Tunisia suddenly explode? One theory is that the proliferation of cell phones--as Salman Shaikh, Director, Brookings Doha Center reports in the blog:

"To glimpse the nature of what can emerge, we should understand the rapidly changing social structure of Arab societies. Those societies are more educated, urban and connected than ever before. Due to the phenomenal growth of secondary and university-level education, literacy rates among the region's youths have skyrocketed in the past 40 years. The percentage of people living in Arab cities has risen by 50% in the same period.

The number of mobile phone users and internet users has proliferated to hundreds of thousands since the technology was introduced to the region 10 or 15 years ago. No wonder, then, that the people have finally snapped at the lack of opportunity and representation and the high levels of corruption and control that characterize their lives."

As Shaikh adds:

"Most tellingly, more has united the protesting people than divided them. Notable has been the absence of a clear, emerging leader of the protests, particularly from Islamist party leadership.

All of these changes have been fueled ironically enough by other US made inventions --namely the internet, Twitter and Facebook--that Shakih notes "has sustained the spread of the Arab revolution."

So we have a demand for a more pluralistic and open society that the old top down leaders used to one way broadcast technology (TV and radio) are finding increasingly harder to resist. The medium is in this case very much the message. Where it ends no one knows but other repressive regimes may now be seeing some writing not on their real and their Facebook walls.

Take a look at Google's NGrams and See if you Can Use it In Your Classroom

2011-01-22T17:31:00.000-08:00

Ngrams are a wonderful new invention by Google. I would encourage you to play with
this way to use Google's formidable bank of digitalized books from the 1800 to the present. In the above ngram you can see how the word "global" comes into vogue during the post war period and after a long term decline in use, love justice and empathy are all on a very slight upswing. What to make of these trends is anyone's guess but it could provide a fascinating challenge for students to find out how these words' changing fortunes reflect our changing times. Let me know what you think.

My New Zine: Take a Look--Focused on Global Teacher Resources

2011-01-19T09:54:00.001-08:00

Global Picture - Picturing our Globe Today

Create Your OpenZine

Empathy at the Core of Our Work as Global Educators?

2011-01-18T13:22:00.000-08:00

The development of empathy I would like to think is at the core of our work as global educators. As best selling author and polymath Jeremy Rifkin makes clear it is part of what makes us human and has led us to develop the kind of civilization we now inhabit. The big question he asks in this very entertaining animated lecture (a nice change of pace by the way from the TED lecture which should be renamed Talk, Emote and Dumbfound) is can we move beyond our ties to family, then community and to country to embrace and empathize with the world community. The answer we give to that one could determine whether we can survive as a species or not. Take a look and decide:

The Military Industrial Complex--Fifty Years On

2011-01-17T08:53:00.001-08:00

It is 50 years since President Eisenhower gave his great farewell speech in which he warned of a military industrial complex. The import of the warning in the nationally televised speech that aired on January 17th 1961 was largely ignored, particularly the theme that as Andrew Bacevich points out in this month’s Atlantic magazine was woven into the text that spending on arms was akin to “misappropriation of scarce resources” a kind of theft. “Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold are not clothed.” Any nation that spends to purchase arms is “spending more than mere money.. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Eisenhower made the first effort any President has done before or since to quantify the cost for ordinary people “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities..We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people.”

But the US continued to ignore the warnings. In the 1950s with economic prosperity booming the politicians and the public saw no need to trade off between guns and butter. We seemed to have sleepwalked our way into what Bacevich terms as the “national security state”
That state has such power over us so that despite the need for harsh choices, we are no closer to taking any kind of close look at $700 billion (doubling in the past decade)defense budget and no closer examining the underlying assumptions that dictate that we still need a huge defense build up after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of asymmetrical war fare. In addition we exceed $80 billion in intelligence spending. Our military outlays are almost the same as all other nations combined. We continue with “threat inflation” as some have termed it to order new bombers and new battleships despite the chronic needs of America’s poorest citizens, the deteriorating infrastructure and the palpable needs to grow a 21st century green economy. Eisenhower wanted the people, the citizens to exercise common sense oversight over the expanding military budget—“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” We know that military spending does not very much for the economy—investments in schools and hospitals would yield far more in jobs than missile production but 50 years later our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq costing one trillion (at least) with the final cost coming closer to three trillion while the military industrial complex expands we are at a cross roads. Can we develop a debate about the size of the military and cultivate a sense of what our global and American citizenship demands?

Plutocrats Need to Decide the Future they Want for Themselves and the World in the 21st century

2011-01-11T16:58:00.001-08:00

The lead article in this month's Atlantic by Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times "The Rise of the New Ruling Class: How the Global Elite is Leaving You Behind" does not offer much in the way of new information about our increasingly isolated and entitled plutocratic class. We have known for a while that the economic meltdown was in part caused by a group of very well educated would be masters of the universe who newly equipped with turbo charged technology tools with money and access to the world's most powerful politicians, journalists and academics. That is why the global meltdown took everyone so much by surprise --I mean everyone! You knew that right? And why the deal that was arranged between the White House, the Congress, the Fed and Wall Street that bailed out the wrong doers was so quickly worked out away from the media spotlight.

What is new and interesting are the details--the quotes from the entitled that reconfirm that they feel victimized by having to pay a few percentage points more for their already grandiose lifestyles and their belief that it was the greed and ignorance of those who got locked into sub-prime mortgages and credit card debt that caused the meltdown. What is disturbing is that some of those most out of touch have working class origins--for example Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is the son of a Brooklyn post office worker and Tony Hayward the disgraced Shell CEO has also blue collar roots. They all share along with their Russian plutocratic cousins a barely concealed sense of entitlement to not just modest rewards for a job well done but gargantuan ones. One of Freeland's informants comments about the change since the 1980s and 90s when “where there were men in their 30s and 40s making $2 and $3 million a year, and that was disgusting. But then you had the Internet age, and then globalization, and you had people in their 30s, through hedge funds and Goldman Sachs partner jobs, who were making $20, $30, $40 million a year. And there were a lot of them doing it. I think people making $5 million to $10 million definitely don’t think they are making enough money.” The executives featured in the article know the streets of Davos and Aspen where the rich and the famous gather with the rest of the global elite for their annual conferences better than their own neighborhoods. Many of them are as one CEO describes himself-"global nomads open to many perspectives." One of the perspectives is that the US is overpriced and that US businesses if they are going to be successful must "internationalize aggressively"--meaning they have to locate their businesses closer to their customers and that relatively high priced US workers must either take a pay cut
or demonstrate their superior value. One of the CEOs believe that if the price of three or four people in India or China to be lifted out of poverty is for a member of the US middle class to drop their living standards (read unemployed) then the price can be justified. It would be nice to believe they were saying these things because they genuinely wanted to help relieve poverty in Asia but it is doubtful. The real intention seems to be to want to bring the price of labor down everywhere so that profits can be more easily extracted. This maybe what Lloyd Blankfein was referring in his arrogant way to "doing God's work" when he tried to placate public outrage about his role and the role of brokerages like Goldman Sachs during the recent financial meltdown. If they truly believe that the world is better off with their version of global capitalism it would be great to subject these ideas to public debate, but as is so often the case these issues are never properly discussed except among their elite politician friends for whom they raise tremendous amounts of money for. Could we at least expect the media to ask the hard questions of our policymakers now that the public is beginning to discover the unfairness issue. Perhaps they could begin with the simple proposition that if we are to become in the US ten times more productive to successfully compete overseas and justify our more than subsistence level compensation--can the plutocrats give a little more back in taxes to create the kind educational and training opportunities for those most vulnerable to unemployment?

The problem in all this is even in a supercharged competitive global environment the oligarchs who bebenefited so richly from globalization seem blissfully unaware of the need to engage around these political and moral issues. Instead they seem to want more and more rewards for their efforts. It would not be so bad if the Wall Street world they inhabit bore any real relationship to the rest of the economy but like the Tulip crazes of a time ago the derivative markets in particular more closely resemble the casino hall as numerous other commentators have pointed out than they do a stock market. As Freeland remarks, "This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can’t exist without the wider community. Even setting aside the financial bailouts recently supplied by the governments of the world, the rich need the rest of us as workers, clients, and consumers." Politicians and the media have sometimes indulged these fantasies and pretended otherwise glamorizing their outsized life styles and party-going in return for favors large and small. Freeland well the consequences of a world where the media and political elite mingle with plutocrats in meetings like Davos and a score of prestigious think tank events. How these gatherings tend to reinforce each others sense of huge privilege and entitlement. No wonder so many of them are prone to foot in the mouth "let them eat cake" type statements that will eventually in this new age of austerity force a political backlash that will begin a new round of protectionism. As Freeland points out that while "plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda—that, for instance, middle-class Americans could conclude that the world economy isn’t working for them and decide that protectionism or truly punitive taxation is preferable to incremental measures such as the eventual repeal of the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts." It will be interesting to watch as the next decade unfolds how far this new global class are prepared to push the extremes. Do they really want to live lives ensconced within high security skyscrapers with their own helipads overlooking the slums where their fellow men and women eke out their daily living--is this what they regard as success in the 21st century? In case you don't believe this type of behavior is possible --take a closer look at the photograph at the top of this blog--it is the 27 storey "home" that Indian Billionaire Mukesh Ambani, that according to one report is "believed to be the most expensive home in the world" ….Located in Mumbai it overlooks the sprawling slums, and as well as a Cinema, Swimming Pools it has you guessed it a helicopter pad...maybe for a quick escape?

Uncomfortable Truths--The Price of Our Electronic Gadgets Just Got Higher

2011-01-08T04:50:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, it is apparent in our ecologically sensitive age that there are two prices for everything we buy--the price we pay in the store and the price we pay for the damage to the planet that is caused in the production of the product. There is a teachable opportunity here that could reinforce some hard to take lessons about the cruelty that sometimes provides the bedrock for the comfort and convenience our products provide us. Take the humble cell phone--most of us have no idea how they work and much less about what the materials are needed to manufacture them. Did you know the product includes the mineral, tantalum, which allows the phone to preserve its memory even when the battery dies. So here is what you need to know about tantalum--it is mined in the Congo under cruel conditions that finance rebel groups. According to Elizabeth Flock in the Washington Post"Over the past decade, more than 5 million people have died, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in the struggle for power, according to the Raise Hope for Congo campaign. While the Congolese government has expressed interest in tackling the multimillion-dollar trade in minerals, the involvement of its own troops has led critics to question their efforts."

The Enough Campaign in the US has successfully lobbied for some actions--now the US has required in the recent Wall Street Reform bill for companies to disclose the origins of the minerals used in their products. 'The plan is that just naming and shaming will ratchet up the pressure, and in turn these companies will lean on the smelting operations that supply the minerals they use.' The state is too weak to control the outright criminality but we as consumers have a duty to find out what companies are doing about the problem. Only consumer awareness and threats of boycotts of those companies that are not moving fast enough to seek alternatives will be effective. The Raise Hope for Congo Campaign is a good start to get started. Consumers have the power to make the changes here as Margaret Bunting points out in her excellent column on the topic in The Guardian, the Congo situation is an instance "of how globalisation generates ungovernable spaces. Where there is a collision of desperate poverty, plentiful guns and a world greedy for natural resources, a brutal chaos results. To combat that, it takes a very tenacious sort of global campaigning – bringing to attention each element of the system and the part it can play in leveraging change – and mercifully, that is what is now finally starting to happen."

Lets hope but it all begins by becoming more globally aware of our lifestyle and its costs.

More Effort Needed to Understand the Struggle of Young People for Cultural and National Identity and Acceptance

2011-01-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

with WINGS and ROOTS - Trailer from Christina Antonakos-Wallace on Vimeo.

Reviewing this trailer soon to be documentary( with WINGS and ROOTS by Christina Antonakos-Wallace)--reminded me of the way we still remain largely ignorant of the issues confronting young people who are faced with the confusing messages societies in Europe and the US provide on issue of cultural and national identity. In the US through the mechanism of the "Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act" DREAM Act we seemed to have come near to recognizing our ethical responsibility to at least grant the children of illegal immigrants who graduate from US high schools, a pathway to citizenship. The legislation would allow such a pathway if such students served either two years in the military or two years at a four year institution of higher learning." That limited pathway to citizenship was rejected by the US Senate on December 18 2009.

We all need to understand not just the plight of the children of illegal immigrants but also the mixed messages that various nations sends to immigrants. Viewing documentaries such as With Roots and Wings can help to see that most countries have struggled with the need to separate a country's identity from an ethnic one and to assist more people to view their allegiance to country in non racial terms.

What Next for Russia as Thousands of Right Wing Nationalists Come out in Strength?

2010-12-26T18:03:00.000-08:00

I am not sure what to make of this but only with a few notable exceptions, the mainstream US media continues to ignore some disturbing signs that Russia is hurtling rightward. Maybe it was all about not upsetting support for the new START treaty which the US Senate was about to ratify with Russia before they headed out for their Xmas vacation. Who knows. I could find some reporting on the issue in the Washington Post and but for more in depth coverage I had to turn to the excellent reporting from the UK's Financial Times(FT) In brief, if you have not been following the story, --Russia has seen this fall the largest ethnic riots since the fall of the Soviet Union and they seemed to have reached a crescendo this last two weeks. According to the FT, " On December 11, about 6,000 protesters showed they were capable of "bringing their

fight to the government’s doorstep – rioting on Manezh Square, underneath the Kremlin’s spires, and openly defying the Russian leadership" The reason for the discontent? The perception that Russia is being overrun by a tide of illegal immigration. While the Russian leadership has sought to play down the rioting by attempting to link it to European wide discontent regarding immigration policies at a time of high unemployment, there are some differences between what is happening in Russia and the rest of the world that bear investigation. In particular the FT points out that "Russian

ultra-nationalism..is a phenomenon created not without the Kremlin’s help..Mr Putin’s Kremlin has used nationalism as a force for political consolidation during his decade in power. His speeches and state news broadcasts have sewn distrust of foreigners and a belligerent form of patriotism, and he has cloaked himself in some of the symbols of imperial Russia. But Mr Putin’s 2000-08 presidency also saw the creation of pro-Kremlin youth movements such as Nashi, which have, in turn, recruited football hooligans to their ranks as part of what is known as “managed nationalism” in political circles."

The violence seems vaguely reminiscent of the Russian pograms from which members of my family sought to escape two generations ago. This time instead of Jews being killed and maimed it is people of darker skin. As the Washington Post reports, "hundreds and sometimes thousands of furious young men have been gathering around Moscow and other cities, shouting nationalist slogans, making fascist salutes and beating up darker-skinned people who appear to be from the Caucasus or Central Asia. A man from Central Asia was stabbed to death in the southern part of Moscow by a group of about 15 young people Sunday night or Monday morning, police reported. " Now having nurtured the tide of right wing thuggery the Putin government is faced with having to deal with the monster they created, leading one Russian expert to suggest that Russia is heading in the same direction politically as many of the Arab states where right wing protest like Islamic extremism is the only vent for frustration within a regime that tamps down every other kind of political expression. Who knows where this is leading but probably not some place good. Are we in for a repetition of the tragic turn European history took in the 20th century. We cannot rule out Russia taking some unexpected turns as economic uncertainty, fear and and irresponsible political leaders without a progressive vision for governing have few scruples about scapegoating ethnic minorities for political gain. Meanwhile we also hear from Washington Post's David Ignatius that Putin seeks to escape some of the pressures of events by building himself a billion dollar play house on the Black Sea. Ignatius tells us that while still under construction it has the amenities of a small city and built from "a combination of corruption, bribery and theft." Plutarch and Shakespeare would have a field day making clear how brutality and decadence can live together inside one deeply flawed leader and allow the audience to understand how this can lead to tragic results. We all need to start paying more attention to all of this--because we have all seen this movie before and we cannot allow it to happen again.

To Be Believable You Need to Provide Solutions, Not Just Deliver More Bad News

2010-12-22T10:39:00.000-08:00

I am concerned with a connection between too much bad news and our willingness to take that news on board and be able to process it intelligently.

According to Scientific American,'s excellent "60 Second Mind" podcast, a recent Gallup poll “found that 48 percent of Americans believe that global warming concerns are exaggerated. Back in 1997 31 percent of Americans thought the concerns were overrated.” The Scientific American asked the question--why the increase?

The magazine writers believe that it could have something to do with the framing of the issue. “ Researchers surveyed students, measuring their skepticism about global warming and their belief in the justness of the world. Participants were asked how much they agree with the following statements: “I believe that…people get what they deserve,” and “I am confident that justice always prevails...Then half the participants read news articles that ended with dire warnings about the consequences of global warming; the other half read more positive pieces focused on possible solutions to the problem. Those who received more positive messaging trusted the science. On the other hand those subjects who read the “doomsday” messaging were skeptical of global warming, and for those who think the world is generally a fair place had even stronger doubts about global warming after reading the negative messaging.”

The study (to be published in the January issue of Psychological Science) is intriguing in that it points to something I believe that occurs in US elections—it is not just that the more optimistic candidate wins, it is that the politician who talks about unpleasant issues such as the deficit, shared sacrifice, need for more taxes etc also loses. Our present inability to balance our budget—to go on believing in some kind of magical solution (nursed by the drill baby drill wing of the Republican/Tea party), has lead us to more pain down the road. How do we apply this educationally? I believe that when we have conversations about large issues that seem full of doom, the media, teachers and for that matter politicians all need to be able to point to positive solutions and frame long term solutions as being within reach and worth short term sacrifice. Otherwise we breed what we clearly have too much of today, skepticism, cynicism and learned helplessness.

Taking a Global Perspective on Closing Down the School to Jail Expressway

2010-12-15T19:08:00.000-08:00

Here is a staggering set of global statistics that the US media is not willing to discuss much. According to a 2008 Pew Report, "The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750per 100,000. Between 1987 and 2007, the national prison population has nearly tripled!

The International comparisons that the media seem to prefer are comparisons of math and science achievement; these educational statistics are meant to goad politicians to keep the pressure on teachers, their unions on testing and accountability. It would seem that our media editors may believe is no point informing the public about such dreary items as the tragic costs involved for the individuals and families who are imprisoned. Perhaps they consider that we are simply addicted to building more and more prisons (costing in the famed words of Jesse Jackson, more to send a young person to State Penn than Penn State) that there is no sense in starting a public debate. Perhaps they also take the view that there does not seem to be a workable alternative to simply locking them up, so why even bother raising the issue? Or they cynically may believe nothing will change as long as "locking them up" polls so well so that our poll driven politicians dare never to bring up the subject, so why should we?

But perhaps if the media started to examine some of the root causes of criminality that leads to offending and how other societies handle those root causes we could make progress in beginning to get a handle on the escalating problem. A recent report traces the problem of juvenile offending back to low levels of literacy. There is a strong correlation between failure to read by the 3rd grade and the kind of behavioral patterns that lead to prison sentencing. Lack of literacy seems to lead to acting out and anti-social behavior, because as the report suggests these children "realize that they are falling behind their peers, but are unable (or unwilling to) verbalize it. ..The low levels of literacy contributes to even lower levels of academic achievement; 48 percent of juvenile prisoners function academically below grade level, according to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention."

It is no accident that the countries that do a better job in incarcerating fewer people and achieving better literacy outcomes are the Scandinavian nations. This is largely because these countries have better family policies when it comes to pre and post natal care and home support for disadvantaged families. They also support a more child centered curriculum for much longer in the child's development, starting formal education at a later date than the US, and emphasizing the importance of play. While it is doubtful that states will do much any time soon to change a cruel system where the only people who win are the growing private prison construction and services. It is about time though that leaders stepped up and told the US taxpayer, stuck with high recidivism rates and equally high bills, that there might be another way. All of this can begin if the media can start educating the public as to how we need to take a more global perspective with regard to this age old issue.

China--A Fragile SuperPower

2010-12-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

One of the many wikileaks refers to China as a "fragile superpower"--and no where was this nation's vulnerability better demonstrated than in regard to their heavy handed refusal to let Liu Xiabo to receive his well deserved Nobel Peace prize and their threatening behavior towards countries to prevent them from attending the ceremony. (According to the LA Times, 19 countries boycotted the Nobel ceremony bowing to Chinese pressure). PEN America Center ( a group I recently joined for its bold stands in favor of intellectual freedom around the globe) provides the background,

"Liu Xiaobo was arrested on December 8, 2008, on the eve of the release of Charter 08, a groundbreaking declaration he co-authored calling for political reform, greater human rights, and an end to one-party rule in China. The document has gained over 10,000 signatures from citizens across China. Liu was held nearly incommunicado at an undisclosed location outside Beijing for over six months before he was formally charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” He was tried in a closed court on December 23, 2009, and on December 25, was convicted of the charge, based on Charter 08 and six essays he authored, and sentenced to 11 years in prison—the longest sentence ever given on this particular charge. Liu’s appeal was rejected in February, and on May 24, 2010, was transferred to Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning Province, hundreds of miles from his home in Beijing. His wife, Liu Xia, is only permitted to visit him once a month."

Liu came to public attention after he staged a hunger strike in 1989 in Tiananmen Square (again according to PEN) "in support of the student demonstrators and led calls for a truly broad-based, sustainable democratic movement. He was instrumental in preventing even further bloodshed in the Square by supporting and advancing a call for non-violence on the part of the students. He spent nearly two years in prison for his role, and another three years of “reeducation through labor” in 1996 for publicly questioning the role of the single-party system and calling for dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. In 2004, his phone lines and Internet connection were cut after the release of his essay criticizing the use of “subversion” charges used to silence journalists and activists, and he has been the target of regular police surveillance and harassment in the years since."

His words on the meaning of going to prison in China today resonate ‘For an intellectual thirsty for freedom in a dictatorial country, prison is the very first threshold. Now I have stepped over the threshold, and freedom is near,’” China has made Liu into even more famous by its heavy handed displays of force which as the Guardian reports has lead to "Scores – perhaps hundreds – of people have been placed under house arrest or surveillance, had communications cut off and been forced to leave the capital or prevented from travelling abroad. While such tactics are common before important events such as political meetings, it is rare for pressure to last so long and be applied so extensively. Amnesty International said it believed more than 250 people are affected" As Salil Shetty, secretary general of rights group Amnesty International stated China's behavior is quite odd, "The Chinese government should be celebrating this global recognition of a Chinese writer and activist," said . "Instead, the government's very public tantrum has generated even more critical attention inside and outside China -- and, ironically, emphasized the significance of Liu Xiaobo's message of respect for human rights,"

Those who rule China must realize this but seem determined to take actions designed to intimidate as if they can't help themselves from following the Soviet Union's futile efforts to hold the lid on its own bankrupt system of totalitarian politics. The New York Times published a great extract from Liu's work, "Experiencing Death" to show the depth of the man's humanity that no society can ever completely crush and because of that, because their leaders know (like those in North Korea, Burma, Iran) that they are on the losing side of the battle between freedom and oppression, they will always be the fragile whether they are superpowers or not;

I had imagined being there beneath sunlight

with the procession of martyrs

using just the one thin bone

to uphold a true conviction

And yet, the heavenly void

will not plate the sacrificed in gold

A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses

celebrate in the warm noon air

aflood with joy

Faraway place

I’ve exiled my life to

this place without sun

to flee the era of Christ’s birth

I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross

From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash

I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s

about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road

I’m biking home

I stop at a cigarette stand

A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle

some enormous brutes seize me

I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged

thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

A blink, a trembling instant passes

to a flash of awareness: I’m still alive

On Central Television News

my name’s changed to “arrested black hand”

though those nameless white bones of the dead

still stand in the forgetting

I lift up high up the self-invented lie

tell everyone how I’ve experienced death

so that “black hand” becomes a hero’s medal of honor

Even if I know

death’s a mysterious unknown

being alive, there’s no way to experience death

and once dead

cannot experience death again

yet I’m still

hovering within death

a hovering in drowning

Countless nights behind iron-barred windows

and the graves beneath starlight

have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie

I own nothing

This poem was translated by Jeffrey Yang from the Chinese.

On Meeting the Star of The Namesake -Kal Penn (Kalpen Suresh Modi)

2010-12-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

One of my all time movie watching pleasures was The Namesake. For me the film ranks up there with some of the movies like Scent of a Woman and Shawshank Redemption--films which bring deeply imagined characters and their stories to life, so that we so identify with their struggles that we begin to see the world differently through their eyes. Based on a short story by accomplished Indian writer Jhumpa Lahiri, it featured Kal Penn had starred in a bizarely original comedy Harold and Kumar. According to one source it was John Cho who played Harold who first suggested to Penn that he should read the story which later led to both of them discussing getting the rights to the movie. Mira Nair had already brought those rights and moreover had thought of casting a Bollywood leading man as the protoganist Gogol Ganguili. It was Nair's son Zohran who persuaded his mother to cast Penn in the central role since he loved Penn's work in Harold and Kumar. Incidentally Kal Penn is his stage name, an Americanized version of his real name, Kalpen Suresh Modi For a country of immigrants, there have been few great movies made about the immigrant experience, The Immigrant with Charlie Chaplin comes to mind emphasizing that the more common way of addressing immigrant experience is to turn it into a comedy like Green Card. The Namesake is a game changer in the way that it focuses with relentless honesty on the pain of separation from one's culture and the challenges facing both the generation that leaves the homeland and for the children who try to live in the new culture.

This is just a prologue to a small encounter with the great actor at this year's Kennedy Center honors, where we briefly got a chance to chat about the movie and how much I enjoyed it and how much my children liked his other comedic roles. We also chatted about his return to the Obama administration as an Associate Director in the Office of Public Engagement, (according to the Note he will be "conducting outreach to the American public and various organizations, he will be the point person for those in the Arts, Youth, and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities." )What I liked about Penn was his modesty and his interest in politics he stumped in his personal capacity for the President and Senator Boxer in the last election cycle and has personal capacity to promote the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the passage of the DREAM Act. He also met with artists, arts businesses and youth entrepreneurs in the Detroit area where the "Harold & Kumar" movie was shot. He also visited U.S. troops in Hawaii, South Korea and the Korean Demilitarized Zone on a USO tour in August. According to Wikipedia both of his parents are Gujarati immigrants from India.^[8] He has stated that stories of his grandparents marching with Mahatma Gandhi for Indian independence were a significant influence on his interest in politics.

Penn's willingness to challenge himself with new roles as well as his ability to move in and out of Hollywood and not be trapped as a traditional movie actor speak volumes about his character and his abilities. May he continue to surprise and entertain us with his outstanding talent.
If you have not seen the movie The Namesake you must, here is the trailer:

Wiki Leaks: Analyzing the World Wide Story for What We Can Learn About Our Media

2010-12-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

Wiki Leaks leak of the US State Department secret cables allows us to gain a snapshot of the world as the US sees it in the post 9/11, post Bush era. It is also another one of those teachable moments to understand how different countries handle a world wide story involving many of the world’s major countries. We learn for example from The Washington Post, that China and the Arab world “have suppressed virtually all mention of the documents, avoiding the public backlash that could result from such candid portrayals of their leaders' views.” The article suggests that the documents present an interesting question as to see whether new social media forces can overcome the authoritarian control. Marc Lynch, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, writes in his Foreign Policy blog

"This may be a critical test of the real impact of Arabic social media and the Internet: can it break through a wall of silence and reach mass publics if the mass media doesn't pick up the story?".

It is interesting to sample the comments that have largely focused in the US on the damage to the country from such revealations. Dothat writing in the New York Times believes that,

“Systems will turn inward; information-sharing will decrease; further centralization, rather than any kind of devolution or transparency, will be the order of the day. And all the while, the useful work that’s done by “America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices” — the prevention of wars, the anticipation of crises, the discreet management of difficult situations — will become that much more difficult to accomplish.”

The popular media were also concerned about the diplomatic fallout but more attention was paid to the mysterious fugitive from justice, Julian Assange, and the Interpol search he has caused to be launched. The right wing and its media in arms was eager to cast Assange as a terrorist while the center and the left adopted a more reflective stance; for example the Economist opined,

“If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.”

The Guardian noted the misdeeds included in the leaks in startling and embarrassing detail. The paranoid style of American foreign policy sometimes seems to take an oddly lunatic turn,

“..It (the State Department) called for detailed biometric information "on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders" as well as intelligence on Ban's "management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat". A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi said biometric data included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans.”

Revealed in the Guardian story are the concerns about the interconnected ways drug running and terrorism are connected--the State Department before it meets with any officials from many countries needs to assuire itself that they stay away from officials with connections to the widespread endemic around the globe For example, "In a cable to the embassy in Sofia last June, five months before Clinton hosted Bulgaria's foreign minister in Washington, the first request was about government corruption and the links between organised crime groups and "government and foreign entities, drug and human trafficking, credit card fraud, and computer-related crimes, including child pornography".

“Washington also wanted to know about "corruption among senior officials, including off-budget financial flows in support of senior leaders … details about defence industry, including plans and efforts to co-operate with foreign nations and actors. Weapon system development programmes, firms and facilities. Types, production rates, and factory markings of major weapon systems".

Timothy Garton Ash, distinguished British academic, writing in The Guardian also writes perhaps one of the most balanced assessments and sees nothing to get unduly worried about in the cables;
“..from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of. Yes, there are echoes of skulduggery at the margins, especially in relation to the conduct of "the war on terror" in the Bush years. Specific questions must be asked and answered. For the most part, however, what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation's interests and their government's policies.

Ash is responsible for the best intro to any piece I have seen “It is the historian's dream. It is the diplomat's nightmare” Ash picks up on a theme that many have noted the way America is obsessed with the post 9/11 threats to security,
“More broadly, what you see in this diplomatic traffic is how security and counter-terrorism concerns have pervaded every aspect of American foreign policy. But you also see how serious the threats are, and how little the west is in control of them. There is devastating stuff here about the Iranian nuclear programme and the extent not merely of Israeli but Arab fears of it ("cut off the head of the snake", a Saudi ambassador reports his king urging the Americans); the vulnerability of Pakistan's nuclear stockpile to rogue Islamists; anarchy and corruption on a massive scale in Afghanistan; al-Qaida in Yemen; and tales of the power of the Russian mafia gangs, that make John le Carré's latest novel look almost understated.”

Pacifica news Democracy Now has one of the issues that the press has not talked about and is happy to leave unaddressed—the way the cables reveal torture under the Bush administration. Pacifica news has been one of the few voices that suggest that the torture allegations are the most important items to come out of the leaked cables. Their Internet TV and News channel could be broadcasting from another planet for all the number of stories they cover about breaking news events versus the mainstream media. For example they have an interview with Juan Méndez, the new U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment..who "has called on the United States to investigate and prosecute torture committed under former President George W. Bush. He also said he hopes to visit Iraq and Guantánamo Bay to probe widespread torture allegations." They quote Méndez making a point that seems not to have occured to many in the mainstream media as to why we are so focused on Assange and the legal actions that may or may not be called for against him versus the concern "about the documents that show that thousands of people first imprisoned by U.S. forces [were] transferred to the control of forces in Iraq and perhaps even in Afghanistan, where they knew they were going to be tortured."

Hopefully any media analysis of the WikiLeaks will ask the question why? Why is Pacifica one of the few media organizations willing to probe the story more deeply..?

Ash must have the last word when he notes that one thing will change following the leaks;

“US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD. Gaga, or what?”

Giving this Season Could Improve Your Happiness as Well as Help People in Need

2010-11-30T10:26:00.000-08:00

As we enter the gift giving season it may be a good idea to visit sites like Oxfam America and UNICEF which allows you to send a new kind of gift card--with a photo of a donkey or a goat
on it that you have donated in the person's name to a village on the other side of the world. This seems a neat idea--give a sheep for $50 instead of buying a sheerling coat that if you were honest you don't really need. As the Oxfam America item description reads:

"Raising these fleecy critters allows women to create their own income. What's more, the sheep's wool is used to make local textiles. When you give this gift, you know it's helping others, so there's no need to count sheep—you're sure to sleep well!"
It is a clever idea that Oxfam America has hit on and it does make it tempting when you can also make the donation tax deductible.

UNICEF Winter Survival Pack

If sheep are not in your thoughts this year perhaps a "Winter Survival Pack" would be more to your liking, for $81 dollars ($30 or so more than the sheep) UNICEF will buy

" a girl or boy with the supplies they most need to survive the next 6 months:
Micronutrient powders that help a child on the brink of malnutrition get the vitamins and minerals that are most essential for them to grow up healthy. Immunizations from measles and polio that will save a child from two of the most common and painful diseases in the developing world. Water purification tablets to filter out dirt and bacteria from water so that children can drink without fear of getting sick. Your pack contains enough tablets to clean 50,000 liters of water!"

Something to think about this holiday season as we wander the malls with no idea of what we need to buy for the person who has it would seem everything when compared to the desperate people who reside on our planet! Research supports a more giving attitude--studies "reveal that personal spending had no link with a person's happiness, while spending on others and charity was significantly related to a boost in happiness." According to one reference to a study published in no less a journal than Science--"In a representative survey of 630 Americans..regardless of how much income each person made..those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not." In a separate study of 13 employees at a Boston-based firm, the researchers found that employees who devoted more of their profit-sharing bonus (which ranged from $3,000 to $8,000) to others reported greater overall happiness than those who spent the windfall on their own needs." Something to think about as you are out in the malls this year. How about a sheep and a gift card instead of that tie/gadget or other thing you have plenty of?

Reflecting on the Global Happiness Index Stimulated by a great TED lecture

2010-11-22T07:47:00.000-08:00

TED talks occupy a distinctive place in the world of ideas between the best kind of well argued op ed article, and the lively and interesting lecture. At their best they engage their audiences as few of those latter two formats can when they reveal a lecturer who is both passionate about the ideas he or she presents and able to compress the key ideas into a lively 18 minutes. Rarely do the best of these presenters use video aids and seldom Power Point--they use instead old fashioned human powers of communication. In 18 minutes, you cannot afford to pad out your ideas or condescend, you must energize and sometimes inspire your audience with the power of your words. The format proves awfully good at busting through the heavy fog of the conventional wisdom.

The best at the game are deeply knowledgeable about their fields and use skillfully chosen examples that connect with their audience and many of the best are not traditional academics, they are simply engaged people who through dint of their passion have made their ideas count.

Take the one I heard the other day by Nick Marks, he is a UK statistician the founder of the Centre for Well-Being, an independent think tank at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in London. Marks asks the simple question as to why we are so obsessed with measuring a country's success through measures of economic growth rather than measures of happiness. He has developed something called the Happy Planet Index which shows the relationship between national well being and the amounts of resource it takes to be happy. In the US we take a lot of the word's resources but seem no happier as we consuming 25% of the worlds oil for just 2% of the world's population. The surprise is to find the country that is at the top of the league tables for happines is of all places, Costa Rica which abolished its military in 1949 and has a very broad social safety net for its citizens. Living in a country that seems bent on increasing the gap between the ones with the "have more than enough" and those struggling on the margins in the US and in developing countries this maybe a good time, as Nick Kristoff urges us, to rethink the US model that is leading us inexorably towards a banana state republic. Do the super rich really want to live in a banana republic? Surrounded by high walls, security guards and armored vehicles? As Warren Buffett points out he pays less percentage wise in taxes than his secretarial assistants. Is that their idea of happiness? Why they keep pressuring their Republican benefactors for more tax cuts is beyond me does sheer greed now control them? Maybe this TED talk can inspire them to change their misguided ways--enjoy!

Russian Politics Takes Another Brutal Turn: Perhaps YouTube Will Now Improve the Chances that Global Outrage will be Heard

2010-11-09T13:13:00.000-08:00

In what must surely be one of the most outrageous attempts to use Twitter to conceal a guilty conscience, the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev according to a report in the Washington Post "tweeted Saturday, shortly after the beating happened, that the criminals must be found. " I am referring of course to the savage beating of Oleg Kashin who made the "mistake" of writing things on his blog that allegedly "upset the governor of Pskov and controversial youth movements." The Post reporter somewhat unhelpfully does not provide many details but other news sources like NPR are willing to name the reason that Kashin opposed the construction of a road that was clearly going to be lucrative to some interests. The Post in a sharply worded editorial points out that "the highway near Moscow, for example, is being financed by a crony of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Mr. Medvedev's de facto superior. Mr. Kashin's reporting about the road was attacked on the Web site of a Kremlin-sponsored youth movement, which declared that "Journalist-traitors need to be punished!"

NPR reports "Road construction is considered one of the most corrupt sectors in Russia, offering huge profits to the businesses and officials involved who may see the journalists and activists as a direct threat to their bank accounts." NPR is also reports that Kashin is the second journalist to be beaten up in two days, police were also investigating an attack on Anatoly Adamchuk "by two men outside his weekly newspaper office early Monday. Adamchuk was hospitalized with a concussion, a colleague wrote on the website of the paper, Zhukovskiye Vesti." Admachuks' newspaper also had the nerve to publish critical reports on the highway project.

What is clear is that a staggering 32 Russian journalists have been murdered since 1993 and more than 30 attacked this year and until this beating was caught on YouTube the public has seeemed to accept the horror. Part of the reason for the seeming equanimity seems to be indifference perhaps bred of years of civil rights and humanitarian abuses that were part and parcel of life in the old Soviet Union. Another factor is the low esteem in which journalists even those as brave as the ones who gave their life are held in Russia; as Andrei Richter, a journalism professor and director of the Institute of Media and Law states "The public doesn't view them as watchdogs of government but as people selling stories." Richter goes onto comment that "attacks against journalists are not even classified as major crimes.. Rather than attempted murder, the charge is hooliganism, which carries a much lighter sentence." Now some real outrage seems about to erupt. Let us hope. It is too late now for the 32 and more journalists who were murdered but only continued public pressure will prevent more brutalities. That pressure must continue to demand that the high placed criminals be brought to justice Let us hope that the US administration which hungers after Russia's approval (so they can continue to support sanctions against Iran )will not continue to ignore such incidents. In the meantime (as we pray for Kashin's speedy recovery) we might reflect on the words of Martin Niemöller the German protestant priest who spoke up against Nazism:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out

Obama as Educator in Chief: Reflecting on the President's Mid Term Report:

2010-11-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

An American President wears many hats--from cheerleader to commander in chief to substitute head of state, head of the Democratic party and also (by the way) leader of the free world. The list of roles is somewhat mind boggling and it is no wonder that the protean nature of the office leads to much glamorization by the world's media and a multitude of mostly bad Hollywood movies. The role President Obama seems to have played the most during his first two years in office was as chief legislative maverick with the roles of comforter in chief that FDR played so successfully and the role of pragmatic visionary that President Clinton played during his first term in office much in abeyance. Clearly the times called for some energy to be spent framing legislation and making the necessary deals whether it was to frame a credible stimulus bill while continuing to bail out the banks, developing a set of sanctions that would hold up in the UN against Iran, working on energy legislation so he could support a progressive position on global warming at the Copenhagen global warming summit meeting, relaunching the Middle East peace talks, rescuing the Detroit auto industry, reconfiguring the strategy in Afghanistan and getting health care and financial reform passed, not to mention dealing with the BP oil leak crisis in the Gulf. There was no escaping the daily grind of figuring out where the proverbial votes, the incessant travel and the calls that needed to be taken from foreign leaders. He was more than busy and so not he had not much room for deeper reflections as to how this change was going down with Americans, many of whom were losing jobs and homes and a way of life they had learned to take for granted. During this period of intense work it is not surprising that Obama that had such a fine ear for the country's mood during his election campaign began to seem disconnected from the people who helped put him in office. It showed up first in his disappointingly vague and fragmented State of the Union speech and then later in more routine phone it in speeches and more obviously when he got off to a bad start as talked about the BP Oil spill and made few clear references to where he stood on key provisions in the health care bill. There were only routine statements that seemed to show his concern about the unemployed and his miserable lack of action concerning the hundreds of thousands of foreclosures while seeming to be content with only lukewarm measures against Wall Street's culture of excess. Perhaps we were asking too much--the task to govern a country that had fallen into such bad shape as the one that Obama found when he took office was too much for anyone--short perhaps of another FDR to successfully manage.

Slowly over this two year period, the largely young and optimistic electorate that had voted him in sensed during this time a disconnect between the man they thought they had voted for--fearless champion of the ordinary guy who would "fight" for them, sensed a feeling of betrayal and refused to come out in these mid terms in the numbers they had two years before. Now he faces not just a base that feels alienated from what might be called the "2008 Obama project" but a fiercely partisan attack from a far right wing group, that wants to channel the anger that unemployment and broken dreams can cause into a campaign to stop any progressive agenda from seeing the light and simply wishes to kill Obama's re-election chances in 2012. The tea-party largely middle aged and white has begun to read the US Constitution in mystical ways as a justification for a limited form of federal government that pays only for the defense and their medical and social security benefits and leaves the rest to market forces. The federal governments' historic role in addressing what markets and states have failed to do over the years, that is to address issues of inequality, to repair gaps in the educational system and regulate commerce among other things is viewed as bordering on unamerican and unconstitutional. We are at a sad impasse in terms of the debate when an individual like Sarah Palin, putative leader of the Tea Party movement, who is so fiercely proud of her anti-intellectualism, can claim some political legitimacy and even be considered as a future presidential candidate.

The festering of large segments of the American right into a quasi religious group of zealots who want to turn their backs on the modern world, on all the pressing forces of globalization and burrow deep into a world of fantasy is not good news for a country that hopes to maintain leadership in the 21st century. Whether any of the scale and size of the backlash against perceived Obama's over-reaching could have been avoided if the President had managed to find his governing rather than his campaigning voice is open to speculation. But as all this slips into the past we need to focus on what Obama should do in the last two years of his Presidency. Among the many roles he could choose to play and fate and events will allow him to play he should consider the one of Educator in Chief. He needs to explain to the electorate both his own side and the majority of independents who during this last election season swayed towards the Republican side, what the choices are in plain and simple terms. Obama needs to be the educator-in-chief leading a national discussion as serious as the Lincoln Douglas debates about slavery, concerning the US place in the modern world. Within that theme we can debate what is the right role for the US government to play at home and abroad (given the close of the cold war and the rise of terrorism--it makes no sense that we fund so many aircraft carriers and jet fighters when the threat is mostly coming from failed and failing states like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran) what is the right size of the federal government, a discussion about how large deficits can be in the middle of recession as well as the dangers of making that recession worse by cutting the spending of the only entity that can spend during a recession, and what is the future of trade policy when so many areas in the middle west (many of which voted Republican in sheer frustration this recession) have been devastated. What do 21st century jobs look like, what does an energy policy look like that reduces green house gases, makes us less dependent on foreign oil and helps American exports, what kinds of investments in green energy and education do we need to make if we are to secure them? Many of the Tea-party candidates who will be going to Washington this January to be sworn into office will only have a dim idea of many of these issues, and need to be woken up so they don't end up during their time in Congress simply reciting demagogic talking points. Why does Obama need to lead this effort? For the simple reason that the media has no real staying power when it comes to following these issues or seriously educating anyone about them since they are now convinced that kind of programming is reserved for C-Span while they trade in sound bites by a partisan punditocracy. If the President were to lead a series of town hall debates where opponents of his policy could come forward and be heard and where there would be an agreement to have follow up on the areas where compromise is possible--the American public if not a more global audience would be riveted. The priority should be on making the core ideas related to our 21st century world as clear as glass to everyone and why he wants to take the country in the direction he does based on his analysis of that world. In this way those who seek to use these times to scare and confuse people are marginalized and we use all our modern technology not to keep "amusing ourselves to death" as Neil Postman once memorably put it, but to learn from our fellow human beings who after all share our planet. The President's men would turn this role down I am reasonably sure, fearing he would be satirized as Professor in Chief and the anti-intellectual crowds will portray him as an ivy league elitist. The danger exists. The way to counter that danger is first for Obama to do what too many professors often fail to do, make the ideas concrete and clear and provide good examples, to be talking and discussing these ideas not just with academics but with managers, workers, technical experts and the like, secondly to be seen to be willing to use his energy and intellect to work with the opposition to forge compromise positions. If he finds he cannot afford to compromise he must then clearly explain why. What is the alternative? Does Obama or his advisers think for one second that by compromising with the Republican on their sacred cows such as tax cuts that he can find a way to get re-elected? He must also know they intend to block every piece of legislation however constructive and thoughtful it might be and use his failure to pass legislation as yet another reason to vote him out in 2012. The President cannot truly draw out the venom of the attack by the right wing or its overwhelming negativity out by failing to engage. He must assert the new role, own it and as he does make more of us understand that politics is not some other version of show business played as they say by ugly people, not a game but a serious effort to define who we are now as a people and into the future.

Google Tax Avoidance and Global Responsibility

2010-10-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

So Google avoids US and UK taxes among a host of other countries that it shorted--what a shocker! The company that has the motto "do no evil" has managed to pay only a fraction of the tax it owes. In the US it comes to about $3.1 billion the company has avoided and in the UK the amount is estimated to be more than a £100m. This practice of shipping money off-shore is common among the multi-nationals that feel they owe their shareholders the responsibility of maximizing profits ahead of tax obligations to any individual countries. The effective tax rate Google paid was 2.4 percent rather than the average of 20-25 percent that was really due. If we all enjoyed that rate what fun life would be. As Tapped, American Prospects' blog states

"It did so not just by taking advantage of tax breaks available to corporations for research and development, depreciation and the like, but also by more dubious techniques known as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich" -- “the sandwich leaves no tax behind to taste." These tactics involve shuttling earnings through various foreign subsidiaries with no business purpose other than tax evasion.

The American Prospect asks whether this action was "evil" and answers as follows:

"If Google's definition of not being evil is 'doing more than the average corporation to support the public interest,' then sure it is. It's one thing to take advantage of legitimate tax law, but exploiting these loopholes for the sole purpose of paying less tax violates the spirit of the law, if not the letter. That would be fine if Google was content as a typical business, relentlessly pursuing profit with no thought to the public interest. They simply shouldn't pretend they're somehow better than the Exxons and Goldman Sachs of the world."

The issue is symbolic of the uneasy relationship that exists between powerful multinational corporations and sovereign governments. As governments lose power and global corporations gain it becomes difficult for any single governmental entity to control their excesses. As Steve Pearlstein notes in today's Washington Post only a few days before:

"President Obama made an offer that no one in the business community seems to have picked up on. The "anti-business" president said he supported the idea of reducing the corporate tax rate to a more globally competitive level - 25 percent is the number frequently mentioned - but only as part of a package that tightened rules on inter-company transfers and eliminated enough corporate tax breaks so that there was no overall reduction in revenues or increase in the federal deficit."

Despite some bipartisan support there chances that this will occur are slim as Pearlstein notes reducing the rate down even by a few percentage points will not win the support of companies as large as Google since their dodges are extremely lucrative;

"Right now, it's big global companies like Google that have the most to lose if rules are tightened and tax breaks eliminated, while smaller domestic firms would gain most from a reduction in the rate. Similarly, companies in the insurance, pharmaceutical and energy sectors probably benefit disproportionately from existing tax breaks that do little for profitable companies in retail, distribution, manufacturing and business services. If history is any guide, the odds are that certain losers will out-shout and out-lobby the potential winners.The conventional wisdom is that it will take presidential leadership to reform the tax code and balance the budget, but the reality is that it will require the support of the business community. Up to now, the refrain from the corporate sector has been almost exclusively, "What's good for business is good for America." Are there no leaders left in the boardroom who still believe it works the other way around?"

We badly need an informed debate about the role of global corporations which might lead to a code of ethical behavior that can be monitored carefully based on transparent information. The media at the moment show very little interest in this issue, this maybe due to the fact that so many of the large ones are owned by business conglomerates that are well versed in the tax dodges themselves.

Chilean Miners--A Global Opportunity to Unite?

2010-10-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

One amazing thing about the brave Chilean miners rescue drama was that if you turned on US TV last night and this morning you would see uninterrupted coverage of one miner after another emerging sunglassed from their hellish underground location to be greeted by his overjoyed family. For the US to give up “regularly scheduled programming” for anything let alone a foreign mine disaster for such an extended period is highly unusual and worthy of some comment. When we taken into account that a 1,000 strong press corps is situated at the mine representing over 30 countries we seem to have approached a McLuhanesque global village moment. .The last time something like this happened was possibly the Moon landing. What made this event so important not just for a headline or two but for continuous TV coverage? The human story of course which transcends borders–there was no thought of rescue of anyone for 17 days before the famous note was found written in Spanish in red ink, it read simply: "The 33 of us are fine in the shelter."

But there was also another story to be told about the international cooperation that went into the rescue as the LA Times reports:

“Twenty private mining companies from around the world — usually rivals — coordinated efforts to penetrate the rock, loaning equipment and personnel; the state-run mining company fashioned a telephone system through a second probe hole. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration sent a team to Chile to share expertise about the psychological and physical toll of living in cramped quarters, and when the miners exercise — to be rescued, they must fit into a capsule called the Phoenix, whose diameter is less than two feet — they wear gear that is standard for astronauts and which monitors their heart, lung and other functions. When they are finally brought out into the light they will wear special sunglasses provided by Oakley, based in Orange County..”

We also learn that “long-time enemies Bolivia and Chile are cooperating to support Bolivian miner Carlos Mamani, 23, and Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales is expected to greet the newly freed miners along with Chile's conservative President Sebastian Piñera..”

It is also reported that “work crews have raised the flags of Canada, the US, and Argentina, among others. Palestinian ambassador Mai Al Kaila visited the site, adding her flag to the collection.”

So let peace light and global cooperation spread ! Perhaps this incident will lead to globally recognized standards concerning mine maintenance and worker safety so that future incidents (most sadly the recent tragedy in West Virginia) can be avoided.

.

The UN Millenium Development Goals 10 Year Anniversary: Time for a Reassessment

2010-09-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

There is plenty of comment at this time on the 10th anniversary of the UN Millenium Goals. There are this week lots of questions –were they too ambitious, too vague with too many countries willing to make rash promises of large amounts of cash for the developing world and not having much intention of delivering?

Does the entire process have to be re-thought so that it is more transparent and accountable? For example the Financial Times criticizes the Millenium Development Goals for being unrealistic

“Achieving universal primary education and halving the proportion of hungry people in 1990 was a daunting, if not impossible, task.”

Jeffrey Sachs avers that the system is “broken” and needs to be rethought.

“we must replace the fragmentation of bilateral programmes with a new strategy based on multi-donor pooled funding that has clear timelines, objectives and accountability.”

Bono a well known celebrity fighter for these goals (that he refers to as MDG) writing in the New York Times, thinks the record is better than Sachs and others are prepared to make out,

“Tens of millions more kids are in school thanks to debt cancellation. Millions of lives have been saved through the battle against preventable disease, thanks especially to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Apart from fallout from the market meltdown, economic growth in Africa has been gathering pace — over 5 percent per year in the decade ending in 2009. Poverty declined by 1 percent a year from 1999 to 2005.”

Bono however, agrees with Sachs however that there is a greater need for transparency,

“Right now it’s near impossible to keep track. Walk (if you dare) into M.D.G. World and you will encounter a dizzying array of vague financing and policy commitments on critical issues, from maternal mortality to agricultural development. You come across a load of bureau-babble that too often is used to hide double counting, or mask double standards. This is the stuff that feeds the cynics.”

He recommends the creation of an independent unit “made up of people from governments, the private sector and civil society — to track pledges and progress, not just on aid but also on trade, governance, investment. It’s essential for the credibility of the United Nations, the M.D.G.’s, and all who work toward them.”

As the major western donors struggle with recession –a clear need is to help explain to the people why we need to care about these goals. Goals that did start out in 2000 as quite simple and obvious such as Goal 1 to eradicate poverty

Target 1:

Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day of poverty had diminished in almost every region

Target 2:

Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people

Target 3:

Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

Contrary to what Bono claims the data is not "impossible track"--the UN data is pretty good in showing you the progress towards the goals through such items as interactive maps that show the passage of time regarding key indicators such as the number of people in the world who are living on $1 dollar a day in 2010 compared to 2000 when the MDG were first established:

But Obama is right the information is scattershot and not clearly presented so that a voter could see where his or her money went to what program and with what result.
Another part of the problem, perhaps a more important one, seems to be the media’s difficulty in reporting on long term stories. The TV news is much happier with reporting dramatic incidents and accidents than offering stories that require the perspective of time. When the politicians announce a the famous summits whether it be at “Monterrey in 2002 (to reach 0.7 per cent of GNP in development aid), Gleneagles in 2005 (to double African aid by 2010), L’Aquila in 2009 (to direct $22bn over three years to raise productivity of smallholder farming) and Copenhagen in 2009 (to add $30bn over three years for climate change adaptation and mitigation)” it captures the TV headlines but does not register. Nor does the story of why what these seemingly vast sums mean in terms of real change on the ground—better nutrition, less disease and how these amounts we are spending which are bare fractions of our GDP compare to the extent of the problem. President Obama clearly had in mind the country’s mood, to steer towards less foreign entanglements and less intervention, when he made his remarks before the UN General Assembly the other day concerning the MDG , 'With our economies struggling, so many people out of work, and so many families barely getting by, why a summit on development?' " Obama told an audience of several hundred people in the U.N. General Assembly hall. "The answer is simple. In our global economy, progress in even the poorest countries can advance the prosperity and security of people far beyond their borders, including my fellow Americans."

President Obama is right of course to frame the debate that way if it means gaining the support of the US Congress during a time of national austerity –but the media has to be able to help shape the story and tell the positive stories about International AID such as the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria, which argues Sachs is a better model than the MDG offers because it “pools resources from many donor nations, with an independent review board approving national programmes according to scientific and management criteria rather than bilateral politics. Educators must do their part too to keep up and explain the story that too many of our leaders and our media have failed to illuminate.

Problem Based Global Teaching

2010-09-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Global education is often a matter of bringing topical issues into the classroom in an engaging way that helps students appreciate the complexity of the world they live in. One way to help students realize that they are not just bystanders concerning the key questions that will affect their futures and potentially the fate of the planet is through problem based learning. Students often enjoy serious role play and particularly when they deal with scenarios involving today's headlines.

Students today with their ready access to all kinds of media and information are eager to part of not just a national but a global conversation and because of the Web 2.0 revolution they are primed to do so. After all it is their their blogs, their use of Digg and Twitter feeds, their YouTube uploads that are driving much of what

the media is now interested in writing about and vice versa. Those readers in the main happened to be under 30 and for schools to ignore the power of this transformation in our literacy and news consuming habits seems to be folly. Yet as Pew and other surveys routinely point out the Internet particularly in its Web 2.o form still tends to be viewed skeptically by schools.

But where and how to get started? Global education lends itself in my view to problem based learning, and to innovative uses of technology.

After all the issues related to global learning are ever changing and we have yet to come up with perfect textbook answers to respond to them. Clearly both of the last two facts tend to make teachers more nervous and less comfortable with the idea of including global education. The prevailing culture suggests that teachers need to know the answers and to be in control of the information. What to do?

My advice is to go slow and convince yourself that the old ways of doing business –teacher leading a lecture discussion with students textbook on text following along -- while comfortable and manageable are not working to prepare students for the 21st century world they actually inhabit. Employees don’t discover problems scattered around in textbooks, and answer sheets are nowhere to be found in the modern office. Workers collaborate and communicate online and form project teams that have goals and missions as they seek out evidence for their arguments. Apart from this the evidence suggests that students are bored out of their minds in the traditional settings and many of them simply tune out—and quietly rebel by failing to read set materials and “going through the motions” when it comes to responding to questions.In too many schools the situation is reminiscent of the old Soviet Union teachers pretend to teach and the students pretend to learn.

How to wake students up and engage them is tough—you have to find the right ways into the issues, but if you read newspapers with great world coverage like the New York Times on a regular basis you are sure to find on a fairly regular basis stories that can excite passions and energize conversations and most importantly of all--spark research and the kind of authentic learning that stays with the student long after the test is completed. Take this one I found in the New York Times magazine the other day. It is entitled the Peanut Butter Solution. The article tells the story of how a French pediatrician discovered a cure for child malnutrition and in doing so revealed the fault lines between the interests of free market western capitalism and those of the developing world. So this story can be educational in the best sense if teachers can find the time to think through how to use it in a classroom as a way to help students understand not just the way global economics works, but also the deeper moral questions that often get ignored by the media related to the need to respond to the continuing tragedy of global childhood malnutrition kills five million children a year and a third of all deaths of children under five. So the question for students after reading this is what would you do about the situation. Before they are able to answer that question it is a good idea for them to understand other points of view that they might not have entertained prior to answering that question. They can best do this through participating in a simulation.

After reading the New York Times article students might review an analogous set of facts involving patents in the case of HIV drugs that prior to the Clinton Foundation interventiuon were unaffordable for most of the developing world where the problem of HIV was most severe. This article has a good summary of the issues.

What would be an ideal set of activities for a unit like this? Perhaps a simulation like this:
Divide up the class in teams representing:

i) The French company that holds the patent.

ii) A country in a developing world that wants to develop the same kind of company as Paul Farmer in Haiti has done

iii) A US Peanut coalition that wants to manufacture and sell a peanut based product to the developing world.

iv) An international team of experts that is developing recommendations for what UNICEF, and World Patent bodies should do in regard to this issue.

Have each present their reports on why their views should prevail and argue their cases based on evidence that they have found in researching the issues. Have the international team of experts hear the cases being made and then in turn present their own findings. If one group wants to appeal have them present their case to another group of independent experts sitting in quasi judicial manner and have them write their report either upholding the intial recommendations or reversing them.

Provide a rubric on what kinds of evidence and arguments will be most favorably considered. Complete the assignment by asking the students to write how personally they would resolve the issues and the arguments and evidence they considered to reach their conclusion.

Another Teachable Moment--The Ground Zero Mosque Controversy

2010-08-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

How many teachers will use the recent NYC Ground Zero Mosque Controversy in their lessons I wonder? It is a difficult and sensitive issue to grasp particularly when the air has been made fairly radioactive by recent pronouncements from those right wingers who seek to use the issue to gain some personal partisan political advantage.

There are several entry points --among them the rights of religious minorities under the first amendment to practice their religion. I was reminded of George Washington's bold words in a letter to the Jews of Newport.

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens."

Washington was the President of a new national government in 1787 when he wrote these words that have become central to the country's view of itself as a tolerant home to all believers. It is important to remember that at this time the monarchies across the European continent were still denying Jews their citizenship and economic livlihoods among other indiginities. Each year, Newport’s Congregation, now known as the Touro Synagogue where I visited and first read and was stirred by these words, re-reads Washington’s letter in a public ceremony.

Why not have these magnificent words re-read in every classroom, every year not just in the Touro synagogue--and hear them echo--"to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."?

Teachers could also compare the ways not just the Jews but Catholics had to struggle for their place in the country's polity. As Greevy and Appleby remind us "

"It took Catholics more than a full century to attain their current level of acceptance and influence, and they made their share of mistakes along the way, occasionally by trying too hard to prove their patriotic bona fides. (Exhibit A: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name is now, paradoxically, a synonym for “un-American activities.”) But they earned their place, over the course of many decades, by serving (and dying for) their country, and building their own churches, schools and health care systems alongside public counterparts, which they also frequented and supported with their taxes."

The New York of Review writers also point out that,

"Like many American Muslims today, many American Catholics squirmed when their foreign-born religious leaders offered belligerent or tone-deaf pronouncements on the modern world. New York’s own Bishop John Hughes thundered in 1850 that the Church’s mission was to convert “the officers of the navy and the Marines, commander of the Army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the president and all.” The Syllabus of Errors, promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1864 denied that the Church had any duty to reconcile itself with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”

In terms of media literacy the controversy could also allow students to dig into the real facts of the case which include that the idea for a community center dates back to December 2009, when (according to wikipedia) the religious leader Feisel Abdul Rauf "announced plans to build Cordoba House, a 13-story community center, including a mosque that would accommodate 1,000–2,000 Muslims in prayer, two blocks from Ground Zero. He won non-binding support from the local Community Board. He also received both support and opposition from some 9/11 families, politicians, organizations, academics, and others. The building of the mosque and community center, as well as the initiative itself, was supported by some Muslim American leaders and organizations, including CAIR, and criticized by some Muslims such as Sufi mystic Suleiman Schwartz, who said that a building built by Rauf barely two blocks from ground zero, is inconsistent with Sufi philosophy of simplicity of faith and sensitivity towards others. Supporters for Cordoba House point out that two mosques in Lower Manhattan have firm roots, and one of them was founded in 1970, pre-dating the World Trade Center.."

In other words the controversy is a lot more interesting than it might first appear and certainly highly teachable.

Globalization: A Very Short Introduction

2010-08-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

The term "Globalization" is freighted down with multiple meanings. It is one of those words that are so large, abstract and all encompassing--very much like the word "education" or "culture" that can mean multiple things dependent on the context that the writer or speaker may or may not be fully aware of. One of the real benefits of Manfred Steger's Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford) is he introduces us to some of the most significant multiple meanings for the term and shows how and why the term is unavoidably a "contested one." Steger prefers to refer to the term as a "social condition" that is "characterized by a the existence of global, economic, political, cultural and environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant."

The term is interpreted by academics differently depending on their discipline and political disposition--some believe economics are at the core of the globalization, others believe political, cultural and ideological aspects, while others connect the term to environmental processes. He suggests that they are all guilty of the mistake of believing that globalization can be reduced to "a single domain that corresponds to their core expertise." Rather than going down the road of academic narcissism it is wiser to respect the varied and uneven ways globalization manifests itself--so that while various aspects of globalization have been present throughout history--it is "important to note the occurence of dramatic technological and social leaps that have pushed the intensity and global reach of these processes to new levels."

The short book is jammed full of good examples of how the uneven globalization forces work their magic in important ways today. Educators especially should pay close attention to a number of critical points Steger makes with respect to the ways globalization explodes our traditional view that nation states and home grown politicians and companies control our fates. A deeper understanding of globalization will reveal how more of the world's future is now subject to the interaction of global institutions and globalizing forces that are so powerful they cause sometimes massive political reactions. Reading this book can help educators see the sometimes yawning gaps in the picture of the world we portray to students. Some of the blank spaces include:

i) The diminished power of the state as a result of global corporations controlling as they do so much of the world's investment capital, technology and access to international markets are far more powerful than most states. Wal-Mart for example with sales of $166 billion surpasses the GDP of Poland, South Africa, Israel, Ireland and many other countries ad does Exxon, Shell, IBM and Siemens.

ii) The increasing power of international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization which are largely invisible from the eye of the media and hardly feature in most curriculums are largely responsible for controlling the power balance between rich and poor countries which largely runs on a north south basis.

iii) The increasingly important work of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) sometimes referred to as the "global civil society" like Amnesty International and Greenpeace that account for millions of active citizens throughout the world interceding in local as well as global political events.

iv) The ongoing clash between what Benjamin Barber has referred to as McWorld vs Jihad that has helped spawn Islamic terrorism as some extreme fundamentalist Muslims reject Western values carried so widely through the modern US dominated media outlets which they see as threatening the purity of their beliefs.

I found Steger most impressive on his critique of the ideological dimension of globalization--the assumption taken up by writers like Tom Friedman and politicians like Bill Clinton that globalization is an inevitable force that will benefit mankind and only needs free markets to enable this force to fully flourish around the world. Steger takes apart these naive view and criticizes globally controlled media outlets such as the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times etc. for mindlessly subscribing to this ideological view. Steger acknowledges that what he refers to as "the globalists"--have the benefit of a "strong discourse" that is "notoriously difficult to resist and repel" --it is far from a water tight one and it would pay to actually look at the facts. It is not the case for example (as the globalists like to argue) that globalization has narrowed the gap between the richest and poorest countries. Using UN data he shows that while the income ratio between the richest and poorest countries in 1973 before the rapid onset of globalization was about 44:1 --in the remaining quarter century it had risen to 74:1.

Reading Steger's book can remind us that globalization is a force that can go in many directions and that it is dangerous if the term gets captured by one ideological group such as the globalists. His own view is expressed in the introduction:

"I believe we should take comfort in the fact that the world is becoming a more interdependent place that enhances people's chances to recognize and acknowledge their common humanity. I welcome the progressive transformation of social structures that goes by the name of globalization, provided that the the global flow of ideas and commodities and the rapid development of technology go hand in hand with greater forms of freedom and equality for all people, as well as the more effective protection of our global environment."

Good words and ones I can fully subscribe to. It is now up to educators to make this more open and more challenging view of globalization come alive in the classroom.

Tony Judt 1948-2001: Global intellectual

2010-08-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

Tony Judt was one of a vanishing breed of public intellectuals who thought and wrote about hard subjecthttp://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2010-08/55415713.jpgs such as the fate of democracy,why we should oppose ideological fantasies of the 20th century and the prospects of peace in our late stage of capitalistic excesses.

His best known book, Post War: Europe since 1945, carefully showed the formation of a new Europe from the rubble of 1945 and intertwinned in the masterful narrative was the way many post war intellectuals have been trapped rather than liberated by some of the same ideologies that led to the last disastrous European war.

Judt died last week after a long and painful bout with Lou Gehrigs disease. He fought his tragic fate with enormous dignity and bravery, managing to use a specially adapted voice translator for his severely compromised lungs. Some fine obituaries have been penned this week. The one in The Guardian finely appreciates the contributions he made to modern European history and his effort to reframe the so called two state solution in the Middle East. His passing leaves a huge gap in our intellectual life. Let us hope that other brave independent minds can use his example and try to find a way of talking about the global issues that matter so they reach beyond just a narrow academic audience.

Universities Go Global

2010-08-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

Until fairly recently universities thought they were doing a good job in terms of presenting themselves as a global institutions if they had an active student exchange program. Many university leaders now are realizing that they have to do more as they recognize we are in a new globally connected era. While many mission statements may have been revised to include the term "global" and many high level statements about the intent of many universities to become a truly global institution have been issued, the follow through has often been quite disappointing. A recent report by the American Council on Education, Mapping Internationalization on US Campuses: 2008 edition found that:

" * Many institutions do not see internationalization as integral to their identity or strategy. Less than 40 percent of institutions made specific reference to international or global education in their mission statements, although that's up from 28 percent in 2001.
* The percentage of colleges and universities that require a course with an international or global focus as part of the general education curriculum dipped from 41 percent in 2001 to 37 percent in 2006. Fewer than one in five had a foreign-language requirement for all undergraduates.
* The majority of institutions do not have a full-time person to oversee or coordinate internationalization.
* Despite reports showing growth in study abroad participation, the ACE survey found that 27 percent of institutions reported that no students graduating in 2005 studied abroad.
* Ten percent of responding institutions offered degree programs abroad for non-U.S. students. Forty percent of these programs were established in China and another 16 percent in India."

Although some progress has been made since many colleges and universities now require students take at least one course on a global topic.

I recently visited Tanith Fowler Corsi who is the Vice President for Global Education for Catholic University housed in Washington DC and if anyone can help really overcome the many obstacles thrown in the way of highly territorially minded departments, she looks like the one to do it. Her global perspective started at a young age--born in Monaco of US parents she attended French schools and is comfortably trilingual, she has run global education center at George Mason University and is widely traveled. Her task is to help implement the university's commitment to internationalizing more of the curriculum, linking professors together and develop worthwhile sustainable international projects that produce real value to its more than 6.000 students students. The task is formidable since the tools to change any institution as large and complex as a modern university come down really to persuasion and leadership by example. Clearly we are just starting out down this global road in both K-12 as well as higher education. It is an exciting journey and we will see how both schools and colleges fair as they attempt to redefine themselves and their mission for the new century.

The Life You Can Save

2010-07-29T06:35:00.001-07:00

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer is a book designed to make a difference in the world. Singer is known as the one who challenges comfortable assumptions such as animals do not feel pain when they are tested through reasoned argument and evidence. You might not have followed him all the way with his last book to make the headlines, Animal Liberation, where animal rights are taken to a bit of an extreme but there is no getting around the quiet persuasive power of this very accessible, more personal plea for global economic justice. Singer is Bioethics professor at the University of Princeton and what I admire and appreciate about his style is that it is not full of academic jargon and intimidating references. Singer write simply and compellingly about the world as it is and our responsibility to pay our part in helping to salvage a modicum of justice amid growing inequality and despair among large sections of the planet.

He starts his book with the story of a man who rescues a man who fell onto subway tracks and despite the lights of an oncoming train being visible, he pushed the man into a drainage trench, covering him with his own body. His story is documented in wikipedia as the subway hero and he became Time's Man of the Year in 2007 in addition to being invited to attend the State of the Union. Asked about all the fuss he just replied "I don't feel I did something spectacular. I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right."

We have a duty Singer argues to help our fellow man who as I write this and as you read this is dying. Unlike the Subway hero we don't need to risk our life doing this, nor do we need to complain if we have a bottle of water or a can of soda in our house that we cannot afford it. Having any of these things means we are willing to pay for something that is safely available from a tap when a billion people struggle to find clean drinking water and easily fall victim to to treatable diseases like diaarhea because they lack this basic necessity.

We live in a world where we can easily eliminate poverty if we had the will to do so. Economist Jeffrey Sachs estimates that extreme poverty can be eliminated by the middle of the century. The time frame could be even shorter if defense budgets were cut by less than one percent but still as Singer points out 9.7 million children under five die annually of preventable diseases. There has been undoubted progress--Singer compares our struggle against poverty as climbers who are now in sight of the summit finally after being in the clouds and can see the route through the mist. Some notable people are now stepping up to the plate--Warren Buffett most notably has pledged to give $31 billion and Bill and Melinda Gates $29 billion--but as Singer points out they are but a small fraction to the effort that needs to be made. The effort needs you and I to contribute as well as the three or four billion of those that live in relative comfort in the western and northern hemispheres.

While we are now mostly familiar with the statistic that one billion people live on less than one dollar a day--the real number is closer to 1.4 billion since the extreme poverty has to be revised upwards to mean $1.25 dollars a day given the rise in inflation. We then need to understand the meaning of this number--it means that this huge group of people are at risk for early death--including 9.7 million children who die each year from poverty related causes. Singer points out the incredible affluence of the west--where most of us are wealthier than generations before us reaching back even to Louis XIV--we have health care they could only dream about and a variety of foods, entertainment and opportunities for travel. Our magazines and TV are full of offers for products we don't need, are pure fantasy status symbols such as Rolex watches and fast cars, priced tens if not hundreds of times beyond what any person living in a developing economy might earn in a life time. Singer points to research that shows that $10 billion of food is simply wasted in the US every year.

Then Singer hits you with an unavoidably direct ethical argument --If it is in your power to prevent something--someone dying unnecessarily--without you having to sacrifice anything very much, it is wrong not to do so. The problem we run into here is that although we may be convinced without too much trouble to save the life of one person--how about the hundreds, thousands if not millions who could also be helped? What would the cost be then and maybe at that point the sacrifice would mean not having much money to spend on our own family and communities. We then tend to think that giving a very marginal amount to helping one child or a few beyond our community is a good thing--it is not wrong to ignore or avoid our responsibility altogether.
But each of the world religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam teaches us to give to the less fortunate. But perhaps the Confucian tradition puts the obligation more squarely--in one of the teachings recounts a visit to the king where Confucius says:

"There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, "It is not owing to me; it is owing to the year." In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying "It was not I, it was the weapon?"

The US likes to consider itself a generous country but according to one definitive report on US giving fully a third of what Americans give goes to religious institutions where it pays for salaries of clergy and maintenance of buildings--only about 10 percent is passed on as aid to developing countries. The US is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries in terms of proportion of income given as foreign aid. The average national effort was "46 cents of every $100 of gross national income--the US gave only 18 cents of every $100 it earned."

Singer burrows deep into the arguments as to what kind of foreign aid is best--emergency relief? development aid? advocacy work for a fairer global system? There is also a problem that Singer does not go into much which is the corruption that makes it very difficult in some countries to make progress in any area and the problem of much of the development aid going into the pockets of western contractors. There is also a feeling about the role of government in all this that Singer does not deal with here (Arguing that all he wants to address is the personal responsibility we all should feel) but individual's view of the proper role of government does determine their level of giving. This last point brings up the larger issue related to a diffusion of responsibility that lets people off the hook since we can always shrug off our individual duties to others by pointing to others' role.

But Singer is relentless about bringing the question back to individual morality. In 1999 Singer wrote a memorable piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine that basically recites the major arguments advanced in this book. As a result of that article Oxfam America and UNICEF brought in about $600, 000 more than they usually took in. The point is that people can be persuaded to do more. Here is the power of the pen in action. Singer is willing to stake at the heart of all the handwringing we go through in terms of whether and how much to contribute is the concern with the other--it is as he says "much harder to love the children of strangers than to love your own children." The two he accepts must be in tension--but he argues more defiantly "this doesn't mean that parents are justified in providing luxuries for their children ahead of basic needs of others."

When asked how much is the fair share we should pay--he estimates that according to Jeffrey Sachs the number should be $124 billion in 2001 to raise everyone above the poverty line. The combined gross national income of the OECD nations was $20 trillion--therefore the number should be about 0.62 percent of incomeor 62 cents of every $100 earned. A person earning $50,000 would owe $300, compared to the $116 billion Americans spend of alcohol--this is not a huge number--in my estimate it is $25 a month or $6 a week or the price of a McDonalds meal. Singer wants all of us to commit to giving five percent of our income for those who are comfortable rather than rich and would not involve in sacrificing anything much--you might even find yourself becoming healthier in the process. He names names in terms of those billionaires who could be doing a lot more with their money. Paul Allen co-founder of Microsoft recently did announce that he will be donating half of his funds to charity--perhaps pushed a bit by Singer, but Larry Ellison the highest paid CEO of Oracle has yet to rise to the challenge spending his cash on trophies like a $200 million dollar yacht burning more in a single hour of diesel fuel than a car in seven years of use.

In terms of ethical standards for living it is hard to beat Fair Share International (an Australian community based organization) 5/10/5/10 formula:

+ 5 percent of income to help the disadvantaged
+ Reduce your environmentally harmful consumption by 10 percent each year until you can do no more.
+ Giving 5 percent of your time to helping people in your community
+ Take democratic political action at least 10 times a year --such as contacting your political representatives.

You don't have to agree with everything that Singer says to agree that we could all do more. The book is valuable as a refresher for the key arguments as well as focusing on the question of how to give so you can maximize your contribution and not have it sucked up in administrative costs. Singer refers to the excellent website Charity Navigator that studies the ratio of administrative costs to actual charitable outlays to reassure people that there is transparency and other non profits such as Give Well and Clear Fund study the most effective ways funds are used to help. The ones that come up top of the list are--Population Services International (PSI) that reduces malaria in Africa, Partners in Health and Interplast.

Singer's book has managed to add a huge shot of clarity to the often murky field of what is appropriate and right in the area of charitable giving. It deserves wide readership and as importantly will hopefully spark continuing discussion and debate.

SuperCapitalism as a Teachable Subject

2010-07-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

Robert Reich's book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life came out in 2007 before the recent economic collapse and it is prescient not only about the economic volatility that led up to the events circa 2008 but also the kinds of fundamental changes in US democracy that now need to be in place if we are to survive further horrors. Robert Reich is of course best remembered as US Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration's first term--who pushed for a rise in the minimum wage and far more modest economic stimulus. His progressive ideas led him to lock horns with the great nemesis Alan Greenspan who as Fed Chairman opposed as much as possible a proactive government role in the operation of the marketplace whose golden bubbles began to ferment during his tenure. He was also as he writes in his memoir of those years also (to use his title) "Locked in the Cabinet" as the Clinton White House sailed full steam ahead to fast track trade agreements such as NAFTA without labor agreements in place that could have protected American jobs or funding that could help them retrain for new ones. But this is an important book because it understands the present moment far more completely than most I have read. Reich's insights as an economist and his experience as a policy maker allow him to connect together the key elements of our era--and suggest why there are no easy solutions for a new species of capitalism that threatens to destroy the planet unless we have stronger democratic institutions in place than we have at present.

It all started around the 1970s when the federal government flush still wanting to figure out how to battle the former Soviet Union to the death invested in some very sophisticated new ideas in technology that led to the development of the Internet.
Prior to this period roughly 1945-1970 the US was the unquestioned economic leader in what amounted to the post-war economic boom in which real incomes tripled around the world and world trade quadrupled. In 1953 as a result of a CIA plot to topple a legitimately elected democratic government, the US was guaranteed access to Iranian oil when the US friendly Shah was installed as leader. The US corporations could control prices and wages and stability and security was assured for America's growing middle class even as battles to win rights for minorities and clean air and clean water as the cold war cooled down after the Cuba debacle and the LBJ administration tried to prove that it was not soft on communism by fighting a futile war in Viet-Nam.

As Reich writes "Starting in the mid 1970s the large oligopolies that anchored the American system started to teeter. Their sales, profits and employment became far more volatile...Between 1970 and 1990, the rate at which companies disappeared from the Fortune 500 quadrupled." In a word barriers to enter the market place started to collapse as deregulation of huge industries became the norm--cable television changed the prior reality of three great TV networks controlling the airwaves--now 100s of channels were available. The AT&T phone monopoly was being broken up as cell phone companies and cable companies wanted a piece of the telecommunications networks that AT&T had previously regarded as their own. Airline companies that had owned major routes were challenged by smaller regional carriers to give them some room to compete.

Then the digital revolution and Microsoft challenges IBM and then Google challenges Microsoft for world dominance. In this period no company could feel safe as costs to compete with the big boys was finally lowered so anyone with a great new idea and a good business plan could get investors to buy in. Think Fed-Ex, AOL,Yahoo and of course Apple. It meant that because these companies could literally sell to the world and had few of the old labor and transportation costs returns could be sky high for modest investments as cargo containers (perfected by the military in the cold war period) could ship goods for far less cost and manufacturing could span the globe as supply chains became extended. This as Reich persuasively argues created enormous challenges for politicians--on the one hand consumers enjoyed far more choice in the marketplace--and with the advent of global giants like Walmart and other huge buyers of merchandise far lower prices. Did anyone worry too much where these goods were being manufactured? Was anyone concerned with the fate of unionized labor in the US or anywhere in the world? Did people really care about the environmental damage or the consumer culture that was being engendered with its appetite for credit card spending?

Or whether companies like Walmart, Nike or a hundred other brands exploited workers while making huge returns for investors and obscene salaries for their executives?
Not when they were taking campaign contributions right, left and center from the lobbyists these new companies employed to ensure that their products were favorably treated by regulators and prevent any new labor or consumer credit laws from having any teeth. But for Reich this issue of how the corporations make money is not really important. He simply does not care as long as they obey the typically very weak US laws. It is the business of government to try to set boundaries and define legal and illegal practices. He is not in favor of either consumers banding together to pressure companies which he sees as random and often based on single interest politics--or companies setting their own voluntary and thereby unenforceable codes of practice. Under the unwritten supercapitalism rules companies simply have to fiercely compete with each other so they can continue to keep making higher and higher returns for their investors or vanish. They cannot count on the great advantages of stable markets that companies in the pre supercapitalism phase were allowed.

One of the more worrying features of this new era is that there is no debate about these kinds of issues. As Reich writes,
"A change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms might increase slightly the price of products ans services I buy" (but) he argues. "my inner consumer won't like that very much, but the citizen in me thinks it is a fair price to pay." Reich sensibly believes everyone would strike some sort of balance between the two hats we wear-the problem is that the discussion is not available to us. "Instead, our debates about economic change tend to occur between two warring camps representing the extreme positions: those who want the best consumer and investor deals, and those who want to preserve jobs and communities much as they are. Instead of finding ways to soften the blows, compensate the losers, or slow the pace of change..we go into battle. Consumers and investors almost always win, but sometimes citizens get so riled up they temporarily put a stop to things--blacking a new trade agreement or blocking a Wal-Mart."

One of the reasons (Reich does not discuss) that the consumers/investors win is that the media has been largely, if not bought off by corporate interests, so afraid of offending them that they are incapable of framing the issues in ways the public can understand. Most of the time they don't even bother --moving on from one sensationalized issue to the next--never remembering or caring to return to any one of them so we are capable of putting them into any real human, historical or global perspective.

Reich repeats again and again the arguments as to why supercapitalism is incapable of having a conscience about the kind of destruction it is wrecking on the globe. Over and over we read they are just there to be in business to make as large a return as possible for their investors. But after banging that particular drum for so long the arguments start to sound hollow. Reich takes the example of China and how both Yahoo and Google have made every effort to appease the Chinese government even when they have used their technologies to push their clamp down on human rights. Reich argues that they are blameless because under Supercapitalism there are no rules except to make money --if they were to retreat from China they would lose out to Microsoft etc. But Reich does not acknowledge sufficiently that these companies risk damaging their image as a smart but humane companies (Googles' motto "do no evil" comes to mind) and they could lose customers and investors if groups decide to boycott. But the problem is that they so rarely do. The other way that companies could be harmed is if the Congress gets so incensed with some morally outrageous behavior that they pass a law to stop that conduct. But Reich is savvy about the reasons why --particularly with respect to China's human rights abuses Congress tends not to act. Instead they hold hearings where they haul up CEOs in front of them and try to shame them in front of the media but seldom go the next step and take legislative action--preferring instead to collect nice campaign handouts from those very same companies who show their gratitude for the policitians restraint in not really addressing the core issues. Then to counter any remaining negative effect from morally dubious policies and acts, companies typically invest in media campaigns to reconfigure their image. Reich is particularly good concerning the way BP in a whole series of incidents reminiscent of the Gulf spill invested millions in making people believe it was environmentally friendly and "beyond petroleum" when the facts show that the company was investing a fraction of its huge profits in things like alternative energy to keep the bad publicity at bay.

The answer to all this? Nothing new here -take the money out of politics by having publically funded campaigns. Reich would also abolish corporate income tax--because corporations should not be treated as individuals and should be denied "any right or responsibilities or a legislative role in State matters." Too bad that the Supreme Court in an inexplicable move just gave corporations a bucket load of more rights as they can freely express their political views in elections even those based off shore.

My own sense from reading this book is that while opinion poll after opinion poll suggest that only a tiny fraction of consumers would prefer to buy from companies that favor socially responsible practices over those that have no concern for them, that dynamic can change. We as teachers should help our students better understand the central trade off that Reich focuses on between choice,low prices and high stock returns versus lowere wages, obscene profits for a few and growing inequality.
It is our duty as educators to help our students to understand the world they now live in, the kinds of choices we have in this world and to help them to look beyond that shiny new gadget that they want to sell you to how that buying decision effects you, your families and your communities. In particular we should enabling students to spot the double games that corporations and politicians sometimes play with the media around these issues. I don't agree with Reich that being a business in a supercapitalist era gives companies the right to run roughshod over human rights. While our politicians and media have turned a deaf ear to the issues--we as citizens can remind them that they exist because of our vote and our airwaves. It may well be a long time before we get the third party politics that might rid money from politics or at least significantly reduce its impact, until then we might want to continue to understand how the many consumer campaigns that have been successful --from Greenpeace to the ones that took place with regard to the South African apartheid regime and Nike, worked and could be replicated. In the last analysis democracies have to be educated to care--as Thomas Jefferson said so well "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

When A Billion Chinese Jump

2010-07-17T08:43:00.001-07:00

Our era will no doubt be written about in terms of the rise to power of China and India. As statistician Hans Roesling has pointed out in the earlier blog their post war emergence has come as a result of a growing progress in health, food production and easing of trade restrictions and it is truly a remarkable story. What is not told as often is the cost of such a rise in terms of environmental damage. A new book --When A Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts and recently reviewed by Guardian book critic Isabel Hilton, indicates the scale of the way the Chinese made no accomodation in their plans for the environment. They simply tore up forests, polluted rivers and did basically whatever was necessary to forge a new industrial economy out of what was basically a feudal agrarian society. As Hilton grimly explains,

"In the past 10 years, the bills have begun to come in: they include acute and chronic water shortages, toxic algae blooms, desertification, acid rain, dying grasslands and angry people. The new middle classes in the prosperous cities of eastern China now want dirty factories closed or cleaned up, but the inland provinces further back in the queue for prosperity are keen to welcome them. In 2007, the World Bank conservatively estimated the cost of Chinese pollution at 5.8% of GDP. (Others have put it as high as 8 to 12%.) If we subtract these sums from China's headline growth, the present looks substantially less impressive and the future more worrying still. Illegal deforestation in China continues, despite belated prohibition; the pollution carried down China's rivers poisons the sea from the Bohai Gulf to the Pacific; particulates are carried on the winds to other countries and China's contribution to the great brown cloud helps to create a giant smog blanket even over otherwise unpolluted areas of Asia."

The book basically tells the story that the Chinese want to do their best to cover up as they tried so earnestly to do in their hosting of the Olympic games last year, by Watts' book shows the true costs of those cheap Chinese goods we have been so keen to import,

"..there is Linfen, a coal town in Shanxi province, said to be the most polluted place in the world, where birth defects run at six times the national average which, in turn, is three to five times the global norm; where the miners' death rate per ton of coal is 30 times that of the United States and nearly a million people's homes are affected by subsidence; where the cost of damage to human health and the environment in the province in 2005 was estimated at £2.9bn...
The Yellow river, the birthplace of Chinese civilisation, is all but destroyed. The government has encouraged people to move west from the overpopulated heartland into the arid and mountainous lands of the Uighurs and the Tibetans, places able to support sparse populations but where ecosystems rapidly collapse under the weight of numbers. The days of the last remaining paradise, the astonishingly biodiverse province of Yunnan, according to Watts's account, are numbered."

The scale of the devastation in other words is almost unimaginable. Nowadays --if there is a ray of light in all this the Chinese are ostensibly for sustainable development and a low carbon economy as it seeks to dominate the green energy technologies but it will take more than words to change what Watts uncovers as a cultural bias away as Hilton puts it "the entrenched idea that nature exists to be exploited and plundered and that any environmental problem can be fixed by engineering."

The title of the book is derived from Watts' childhood where the belief was shared among school children of my generation as well that if a billion Chinese jumped at one time, they could knock the world off its axis. Now the actions of a billion Chinese could do the same and it maybe time to remind them and ourselves of that. As Hilton neatly states--"The west invented unsustainable living; China has taken it up with enthusiasm." The same maybe said of India by the way the other billion people sized neighbor to the west.

Recommended Podcasts that assist us in Developing Global Perspective

2010-07-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

This will be an occasional series where I recommend some of the podcasts that have consistently helped me develop a global perspective. One of the problems in living in any country but particularly the US is that the media often focus on national and local issues and give international stories short shrift. When they do focus on international issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afgahanistan and various emergencies the reporting can be of a very high quality but much of the actual discussion related to the meaning of those reports frequently gets lost in talk shows. The commentary often just has people who reflect the major party viewpoints and are naturally focused on the US interests. Everyone needs to develop counter perspectives to the conversations that tend to dominate their national media. One of the podcasts that makes an effort to invite new thinking and global perspectives is Andrew Marr's Start the Week on BBC 4--that can easily be found and downloaded from the I-Tunes Store. All 56 shows can be downloaded from the BBC website
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9xr

What I like about Marr's show is the fact that he seems to have read the books that are often featured on the show (and to be honest why he is able to attract some stellar guests) and he is capable of conducting a conversation that genuinely explores issues in an open, accesible and clear way.

Some of the recent ones I recommend include the following broadcast on July 6 with the novelist Yann Martel, "who wrote Life of Pi, explains how a donkey and a howler monkey are central to his latest book, Beatrice and Virgil." Martel helps describe how his latest book is an attempt to understand the holocaust and why art and imaginative writing can uniquely assist us in the important act of remembering the holocaust so we can connect the event to today's realities.

May 17 2010's show gathered together a fascinating panel leading to a wonderfully far ranging global discussion that included "historian and former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Stone, gives his personal take on the Cold War. The journalist, Ben Judah witnessed the toppling of the President of Kyrgyzstan last month and reflects on the fate of this former Soviet state. The Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor explores what historical objects can tell us about leadership, and Marina Warner looks back at the art and music that expresses a genuine dialogue between East and West."

Ian Buruma expounded upon the interplay of religion and politics clash in three continents based on the research for his book "Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents" in the May 25th program.

An all star line up was present on January 3, 2010 when "Anthony Julius tells Andrew Marr how far he thinks anti-Semitism pervades English culture, while Alexander McCall Smith argues against the hegemony of the English language, in favour of Scots. Jonathan Safran Foer explores what we eat and why and whether meat is murder and Graciela Chichilnisky explores the links between danger, risk, climate change and changing behaviours."

Another worthwhile 45 minutes can be spent listening to the show broadcast on January 11, 2010, where Andrew Marr's discussion included "the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk about obsessive love and his decision to blur the distinction between fiction and reality with the opening of The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul; Barbara Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America's culture of positive thinking and irrational optimism; Simon Schama invesigates the Obama effect; Russian expert Susan Richards explores the importance of national myths."

The real virtue of podcasts of this kind is that they can remind you what really informed discussion looks like when it takes a more leisurely less frantic less nation centered take on the world. We seem in this busy and hysterically minded age to have lost some of the ability to step back and reflect--Marr's show is welcomed antidote to these tendencies.

Rethinking History Teaching

2010-07-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

The question of how to teach history in schools is a hard subject to avoid these days as countries around the world struggle to rethink their place in response to rapid globalization trends. It has come up afresh in my mother country, England where there is talk by the new coalition of government of revising the history curriculum.
The Independent in an interesting interview with Niall Ferguson, the noted historian and media personality who might help the UK government revising the curriculum, made some interesting points about some of the challenges involved in teaching history today in schools. In order to get away from the inevitable tendency by all countries to conceive of history as a great national epic and as a result become one of the least liked subjects, he suggests a question based approach that does not assume that historians or teachers are ‘omniscent’ and that history is just a set of dates to be learned. He would model the approach on the course he teaches at Harvard, “a broad global history from the 1400s to the 20th century, which seeks to ask the question: "Why did the West conquer the rest?” More interestingly he goes on to recommend that the approach be non-Eurocentric: "if you went on a world tour in the 1420s you would not have bet that the West would come to dominate the globe". How it happened, agrees Ferguson, is not simply a matter of Western triumph or still less triumphalism; Ferguson has spent time in China, India and Latin America to investigate why some other civilisations simply "imploded" of their own accord, while others were indeed overcome by European military prowess, or microbes.”

While Ferguson is not saying anything particularly new --his media stardom may now give the approach the extra push it needs to move the debate forward so we resist the temptation to move backwards to the traditional narrative approach favored by so many textbooks and examiners. That temptation seems harder to resist at a time when national identity is being questioned in so many countries faced with issues related to immigration and devolution.

Not that the traditional narrative approach is toast. It can be incorporated into history classrooms but we should concede it can be done so much better on TV. As Ferguson suggests, one of the reasons history is such a hit "on television and in the bookshops but, apart from the Third Reich and Martin Luther King, a lost cause in the classroom” might be because (as Shakespeare understood so well) we need plenty of visual images and drama) for us to soak in the wider import of our past. So rather than shun the History Channel let's use it in the classroom along with the other plentiful sources of multimedia source material available on the Internet. By clearly stating the one fact about history all can agree on that no one story is adequate to describe the past.

Can we persuade the examiners and the politicians to move in this direction? Can we shift classroom history from solely focusing on the special genius and other merits of a national citizenry, or the stories of kings and queens and encourage more "higher order thinking" We need to have more teachers swing open those virtual Smithsonian and the British Museum archives for their students and conducting their own conversations with experts and fellow students so they can discover for themselves that the past is never completely past and the future still open. Given the kind of prestige that Ferguson brings to the current debate it seems that we may just be ready to take this leap.

Now Global Educators Have Fabulous New Tools to Use

2010-06-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

I have written in early posts about the marvelous Swedish teacher Hans Rosling who is able to make statistics come alive for any audience so that historic trends can be seen and clearly understood by a greater number than ever before.

I have to thank Merry Merryfield for reminding me that the source that makes this possible is available on the net at www.Gapminder.org. The non profit website founded in Stockholm by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling on February 25, 2005, uses a special software called Trendanalyzer. The software is able to translate statistical information into animated movies that cannot help revealing trends in new ways that help those (like myself) who have a hard time understanding and appreciating statistical information presented in usual boring formats. You will be seriously blown away by this use of Gapminder to tell the story of how India and China were kept down by the colonial powers and then after the second world war and caught up rather dramatically. The lecture is truly an awesome way for any student to appreciate the global dimensions of the post war world:

If you like this lecture there are plenty of other awesome displays if you check out the TED website and search under Hans Rosling.

How to Feel Slightly Less Guilty about Watching This Year's World Cup--Some Global Learning Opportunities

2010-06-24T06:41:00.000-07:00

It is hard to avoid the World Cup—now building quite nicely to its inevitable climax. We are now looking at many more days when people in every (at least of the last 16 countries) sit and more often stand around large TV screens and yell like mad. Unlike the Olympics there is no pretense about the World Cup that this is anything but international warfare—a match of nations against one another to see who is really top. Nor is the world cup script subtle--the national anthems of the two teams play at the beginning of the match and the players make efforts to mouth the words as if they are the embodiment of the national spirit and then there are the fans who have made the often thousands of mile journey and sport their teams' national colors as if they were going into battle themselves. Despite this excess of nationalism there are some ways that with each World Cup that goes by we learn some new positive things about other cultures even if trivial such as admiring the way a country plays, the way various supporters dress and the passion they show for the game. This year perhaps because there has been so much coverage, television viewers have been treated to some serious documentaries concerning the role of soccer in various countries’ histories, a focus on South African’s love for soccer throughout the struggle against the Apartheid regime or a focus on some of the leading international players.

Another international focal point this year has been the buzz –the vuvuzela. Anne Applebaum writing for the Washington Post wrote an interesting column the other day when she described the different reactions around the world to this loud and for most people annoying sound.

“..for the Germans, the vuvuzela creates a moral problem. Some angrily demand a ban. Others call the plastic horns "traditional instruments of South African football," and oppose a ban, on the grounds that this would demonstrate unacceptably Eurocentric disdain for other cultures. The center-right Die Welt denounced "the intolerance of those who are annoyed by the vuvuzela" and instructed its readers to accept that "vuvuzelas belong to South African football like battle songs belong to German games." The center-left Die Tageszeitung bluntly told its readers to "turn the sound down" on their televisions if they can't accept this foreign custom. ..In France, by contrast, the vuvuzela presents an aesthetic problem: If you can't ban them, then integrate them into the artistic canon. Le Monde suggests treating this plastic horn as a genuine instrument, even providing its online readers with links to vuvuzela works composed by one Pedro Espi-Sanchis ("Pedro the Musicman"), a musicologist, musician and Spanish teacher resident in Cape Town. The newspaper Liberation last week absorbed the term into its art criticism, too, condemning a particularly noisy set of installations as "vuvuzelas de l'art contemporain" ("vuvuzelas of contemporary art"). For the South Koreans, the vuvuzela presents complex issues of etiquette. One Korean columnist feared an outright ban would be rude to the host country. But perhaps other "traditional" instruments might be substituted? "Sometimes when percussionists in the stadium are flashed up on the television screen, I ardently wish to hear the sound they make," he wrote, and then made an attempt at gentle persuasion: "I sincerely hope our African friends will put down the horns and take up other instruments." If persuasion should fail, however, "one can find solace in the fact that the games will be adjourned in three weeks."

What Applebaum describes here is the way cultures work---they basically thrive and grow as a result of unplanned cultural contact –this dynamic was as true in Elizabethan England as it came into contact with the New world as it was in the US’s melding of African and European cultural traditions. In today’s Internet fueled world the reaction and response to other cultures is much accelerated and when global events such as the World Cup take place we can expect more unpredictable cultural and as Appelbaum smartly notes, economic changes.

“the Chinese have been manufacturing the noise-makers like crazy. A million vuvuzelas have already been shipped from Zhejiang and Guangdong to South Africa, and more are on their way to the rest of the world. The Guangda Toy Factory in Yiwu has already raised its production to 20,000 per day, according to one report, and the owner says she will continue to produce them "as long as there is market demand."

Today everyone is interested in building global brands with products--that have appeal in every market --not just a domestic one. As soccer continues its relentless march to becoming a world sport--(the US one of the last bastions of resistance) it is likely to be the vehicle for more globalizing trends. Something to think about as you watch the remainder of the matches left in this enthralling World Cup tournament.

New Approaches to Averting the Drop Out Crisis

2010-06-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

The high rate of drop outs from inner city schools is periodically focused on every few years or so when a new report comes out and suggests that fewer students are graduating from such urban schools than previously thought. The most recent report of this kind was Balfanz and Letgers study of 2004 has been the boldest of recent years describing many inner city schools as no less than "drop out factories" --and found that "there are between 900 and 1,000 high schools in the country in which graduating is at best a 50/50 proposition. "

Now there are moves afoot to begin on a larger scale to address the issue. Some of these efforts are documented in a report sponsored by the Annie E Casey Foundation, Multiple Pathways To Graduation: New Routes to High School Completion, written by Shannon Marsh and Paul Hill that was published in May of this year. One of the approaches the report highlight involves high schools in the district working together identify those students at greatest risk of dropping out. Districts then develop new schools or place a variety of special instructional programs within existing schools. Districts continuously assess these schools and programs for their match to current students’ needs and their effectiveness in helping students."

Cincinatti Public Schools is one of the innovative school districts that is seriously looking at reports like the Multiple Pathways to Graduation as they consider options broadly termed a " portfolio strategy," whereby a school district "opens itself up to an assortment, or portfolio, of non-traditional schools - such as the boarding school or the holistic school - to provide more options to students."

We seem to be acknowledging for the first time in public education that one size does not fit all and that we need to make alternatives available for those the system has had the most difficult time serving. The question is how? How might we use new technologies that allow students to converse with mentors, teachers and form learning communities? How might we use new assessment techniques that would provide real time feedback for students so they can monitor their own learning? How can we ensure that student motivation and interest connects with rigorous and changelleng assignments? These are large and complex questions but it is important that they are being asked now at a time when we need answers more than ever to the question of how we are going to educate our young people to much higher skill levels in an economy that is tolerating in some areas --10 to 20 percent unemployment?

.

Use of Social Media in Education More Widespread Than Previously Thought

2010-06-17T10:18:00.001-07:00

What is interesting in this recent Education Week article, Social Networking Goes to School by Michelle R Davis, are the varied --and non obvious uses of social media for teaching. Principal Eric C. Sheninger, the princial of New Milford High School New Jersey may represent the change that has occured over the past year or so in educator attitudes to social media. He is quoted as stating to Education Week--"I used to be the administrator that blocked every social-media site, and now I’m the biggest champion,” Now the "school’s official Facebook page keeps its 1,100 fans updated on sports events and academic achievements. Students who traveled to Europe this spring for a tour of Holocaust sites blogged daily about their experiences, and received comments from all over the world. Other students have used the video voice service Skype to talk to their peers in states like Iowa for school projects."

These factoids included in the article help explain the trend:

o A study by the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released early this year found that 73 percent of Americans ages 12 to 17 now use social-networking websites, up from 55 percent in 2006.

o Individual teachers having the initiative and skills now to host their own projects as for example a Welsh teachers decision in 2008, Charline Evans --a Welsh teacher "to visit and connect 80 schools around the world."Her route took her across the 7 continents and through over 30 countries to visit a further 78 schools before returning to Wales for the 80th school, Maes-yr-Haul Primary in Bridgend, South Wales.Each school produced a film representing their country and culture."

o Advances in cell phone networking technology so that "Project K-Nect, a grant-funded program that uses smartphones as teaching tools in a handful of North Carolina school districts, allows students to instant-message their peers and teachers with questions on math homework at any time of the day or night. Students can also post questions and answers to school math blogs, where a student struggling with algebra could find several classmates willing to walk him or her through a problem or even post video of the best way to solve it."

o Twitter's ease of use has enabled the easy formation of mini international professional development communities For example "One of the most popular types of educator events on Twitter are “EdChats”—one-hour conversations that take place every Tuesday around a particular topic. The chats are the brainchild of several educators, including Thomas Whitby, a co-creator of a 3,700-member Ning site called The Educator’s PLN, for “professional-learning network.”

Principal Eric Sheninger, takes Twitter one step futher than most--he was able to connect with "a company that donated technology equipment and training to the school, and he linked up with CBS News, which brought national exposure to the high school’s programs."

Something interesting is happening in schools these days and it would pay us to look closer.

Seven Teachable Moments from the BP oil spill fiasco

2010-06-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

First teachable moment --Ask your students why is it that we need to go to Rolling Stone magazine to gather some of the key truths about the BP oil spill debacle? Yes The New York Times and Washington Post did some nice reporting but the key points were often buried deep inside the jump pages. Out of all the quality newspapers perhaps the British Independent did the best news analysis. But leave it to the Rolling Stone magazine (as the excellent Matt Tabibi did with their excellent reporting on the Wall Street meltdown) to put the story together for the reasonably intelligent reader in a way that made sense. There was an avoidance of technicalities and overly complex sentences. Tim Dickinson in The Spill, The Scandal and the President: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder, is must reading for anyone interested in placing the story in the relevant historical and political context.

So part of that first question is to ask to what extent does corporate ownership of the press (and which newspaper barons have investments in BP) have a role to play--how else do we explain the relentless focus on BP's role in all this and not that of the US government in enabling this awful situation?

Second teachable moment--Have your students look at all the degrees of culpability involved in this tragedy not just BPs. As they do this let them examine the governments' role as they answer why the proper regulatory function of government is so critical. Dickinson makes a powerful case that the US government failure to properly oversee the management of oil rigs lies at the center of this tragedy.

"During the Bush years, the Minerals Management Service, the agency in the Interior Department charged with safeguarding the environment from the ravages of drilling, descended into rank criminality. According to reports by Interior's inspector general, MMS staffers were both literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry. When agency staffers weren't joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials. But it was American taxpayers and the environment that were getting screwed. MMS managers were awarded cash bonuses for pushing through risky offshore leases, auditors were ordered not to investigate shady deals, and safety staffers routinely accepted gifts from the industry, allegedly even allowing oil companies to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil before tracing over them in pen."

The mess was never cleaned up and all that the Obama administration did despite repeated warnings that this was a rogue agency was to appoint an oil industry friend in the person of Ken Salazar to make one or two symbolic but futile gestures in the direction of cleaning up the agency. Dickinson fully backs up his assertion that

"Salazar .. worked hard to foster the impression that the "prior administration" is to blame for the catastrophe. In reality, though, the Obama administration was fully aware from the outset of the need to correct the lapses at MMS that led directly to the disaster in the Gulf. In fact, Obama specifically nominated Salazar – his "great" and "dear" friend – to force the department to "clean up its act." For too long, Obama declared, Interior has been "seen as an appendage of commercial interests" rather than serving the people. "That's going to change under Ken Salazar."

Third teachable moment --why was it that every single red light that could have notified us that something was not right with the process was ignored. Case in point. BP was allowed to make up nonsense to justify its drilling licenses and that nonsense even when it was clearly full of first grade mistakes remained unchallenged by everyone up and down the bureaucratic chain.

BP claims that a spill is "unlikely" and states that it anticipates "no adverse impacts" to endangered wildlife or fisheries. Should a spill occur, it says, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" for the region's beaches, wetlands and coastal nesting birds. The company, noting that such elements are "not required" as part of the application, contains no scenario for a potential blowout, and no site-specific plan to respond to a spill. Instead, it cites an Oil Spill Response Plan that it had prepared for the entire Gulf region. Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semi-tropical Gulf? "Walruses" and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions. The mistake appears to be the result of a sloppy cut-and-paste job from BP's drilling plans for the Arctic. Even worse: Among the "primary equipment providers" for "rapid deployment of spill response resources," BP inexplicably provides the Web address of a Japanese home-shopping network. Such glaring errors expose the 582-page response "plan" as nothing more than a paperwork exercise. "It was clear that nobody read it," says Ruch, who represents government scientists. Rick Steiner a retired marine science professor comments that "This response plan is not worth the paper it is written on," "Incredibly, this voluminous document never once discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout."

Fourth Teachable Moment--why is it that only one person so far has resigned over this Why are not more people including large numbers of high level bureaucrats who aided and abetted patently false statements allowed to continue in their jobs. Why are there no calls for Interior Secretary Salazar to resign? How does the President remain serious about the need for accountability in government as well as corporate board rooms when he allows such a reckless individual continue to head the Department of Interior he once pledged to clean up? Dickinson writes

"Had MMS been following the law, it would never have granted BP a categorical exclusion – which are applicable only to activities that have "no significant effect on the human environment." At a recent hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse grilled Salazar about Interior's own handbook on categorical exclusions, which bars their issuance for offshore projects in "relatively untested deep water" or "utilizing new or unusual technology" – standards that Whitehouse called "plainly pertinent" for BP's rig. "It's hard for me to see that that's a determination that could have been made in good faith," Whitehouse said, noting that the monstrously complex task of drilling for oil a mile beneath the surface of the ocean appeared to have been given less oversight than is required of average Americans rewiring their homes. "Who was watching?"Not the Interior secretary. Salazar did not even ensure that MMS had a written manual – required under Interior's own rules – for complying with environmental laws. According to an investigation in March by the Government Accountability Office, MMS managers relied instead on informal "institutional knowledge" – passed down from the Bush administration. The sole written guidance appeared on a website that only provided, according to the report, "one paragraph about assessing environmental impacts of oil and gas activities, not detailed instructions that could lead an analyst through the process of drafting an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement."
This is unforgivable and Salazar should accept responsibility and the entire chain of command that allowed this keystone cop type of performance.

Fifth Teachable Moment

When should a company that so openly and plainly flaunts the rules be banned from operating? Why is it that their proposals are not treated with more than just an extra grain of scrutiny --the kind you might apply to a car loan or mortgage application? BP alone had 760 safety violations against the next worst oil company that had one. BPs' repeated low regard for safety issues it should be banned from doing business--particularly as risky a business as oil exploration.

"In March 2006, BP was responsible for an Alaska pipeline rupture that spilled more than 250,000 gallons of crude into Prudhoe Bay – at the time, a spill second in size only to the Valdez disaster. Investigators found that BP had repeatedly ignored internal warnings about corrosion brought about by "draconian" cost cutting. The company got off cheap in the spill: While the EPA recommended slapping the firm with as much as $672 million in fines, the Bush administration allowed it to settle for just $20 million.

BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005, 15 workers were killed and 170 injured after a tower filled with gasoline exploded at a BP refinery in Texas. Investigators found that the company had flouted its own safety procedures and illegally shut off a warning system before the blast. An internal cost-benefit analysis conducted by BP – explicitly based on the children's tale The Three Little Pigs – revealed that the oil giant had considered making buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: "If the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled." But the company determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead pigs."

Sixth Teachable Moment

What will it take for President Obama to be more open about his administrations' somewhat cynical energy policy--and square the his campaign statements where he was opposed to more off shore drilling with his granting licenses for offshore drilling more freely than applications for daycare centers. Could it be that by hiding behind Salazar's pro oil industry he could finesse the situation in a way Dick Morris might have been proud of? Dickinson writes, "On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling "will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence." But once in office, he bowed to the politics of "drill, baby, drill." Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration's top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted."

"The administration, however, has made clear that it has no intention of reversing its plan to expand offshore drilling. Four weeks into the BP disaster, when Salazar was questioned in a Senate hearing about the future of the president's plan, he was happy to stand up for the industry's desire to drill at any cost. "Isn't it true," asked Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, "that as terrible as the tragedy is, that unless we want $14, $16, $18, $20-a-gallon gasoline, that it's not realistic to think that we would actually stop drilling for oil in the Gulf?" Unbowed by the catastrophe that was still unfolding on his watch, Salazar heartily agreed, testifying that the president had directed him to "move forward" on offshore drilling."

Seventh Teachable Moment

The facts seem to support that the administration made a calculation that things would be easier if it could pretend it was not involved and all the blame and clean up responsibilities could be saddled on BP's shoulders. But that story could not be sold even on a slow news day. The government was in no way just an innocent passive observer. Not only were they involved in enabling the mess that was forseeable, they were the only credible authority that could marshall the resources--the ships that could vacuum up the oil, berms and other material that could help save the coast.

"The effect of leaving BP in charge of capping the well, says a scientist involved in the government side of the effort, has been "like a drunk driver getting into a car wreck and then helping the police with the accident investigation." Indeed, the administration has seemed oddly untroubled about leaving the Gulf's fate in the hands of a repeat criminal offender, and uncurious about the crimes that may have been committed leading up to the initial sinking of the rig. The Obama Justice Department took more than 40 days after the initial blast killed 11 workers to announce it was opening a criminal probe..rom the start, the administration has seemed intent on allowing BP to operate in near-total secrecy. Much of what the public knows about the crisis it owes to Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Under pressure from Markey, BP was forced to release footage of the gusher, admit that its early estimates put the leak as high as 14,000 barrels a day and post a live feed of its undersea operations on the Internet – video that administration officials had possessed from the earliest days of the disaster. "We cannot trust BP," Markey said. "It's clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill."

Will any of these teachable moments make their way ever so slightly into our media conversation or into our classrooms? That is an open question but it is at the same time worth pondering your own role in helping to encourage such a debate.

Yet More Reasons to Become Globally Aware--Oil Spills in Developing Countries Dwarf the Problem in the Gulf

2010-06-10T17:43:00.000-07:00

Everyone's attention is drawn these days to the Gulf spill. What an awful economic and ecoological disaster and we cannot forget the loss of life that precipitated the disaster. But did you know that there is a spill out in Nigeria that is vastly more expansive and damaging than the one in the Gulf. The pipeline ruptured in 2008 in Lagos killing a 100 people and is causing untold damage with no end in sight It is hard to find any reporting on it that will appear on US mainstream news. The information below is taken from a report by John Vidal Environmental Editor for London's Observer Newspaper. The report was filed May 30, 2010 so far to zero commentary in the US as far as I have been able to determine.

This is only "one of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months. As a result "Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months...In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month."

The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."

A spokesman for the Stakeholder Democracy Network in Lagos, which works to empower those in communities affected by the oil companies' activities, said: "The response to the spill in the United States should serve as a stiff reminder as to how far spill management in Nigeria has drifted from standards across the world."

Other voices of protest point out that the world has overlooked the scale of the environmental impact. Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, said: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."

Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."

Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."

Website Revinvents Charitable Giving

2010-06-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

If you have not checked out Kiva.org you should. It will change the way you look at giving. It is based on one of the true pioneers in the realm of how to help alleviate poverty on a global scale-- the Nobel prize winning Bangladeshi economist Mohammed Yunis. Yunis' book Creating a World Without Poverty describes his journey as a young man growing up on one of the poorest countries in the world--Bangla Desh. He started the micro lending movement when he realized one of the key reasons why people are poor and stay poor is that they have no access to capital. and made a $27 loan to women in Chittagong, Bangladesh Since then the movement has grown exponentially and now provides millions of small loans to poor people. Yunis’s argument is a powerful one –that when the dollar is used in business it is basically cycled once---a transaction between a consumer and the business owner or merchant—but with social businesses the funds get recycled multiple times –as capital for a new business it can help pay for raw materials and employees.

Now with the web the process of micro lending has taken off—in 2008, Bala Vishwanath, an alum of top Indian tech and management schools left his his job and started www.UnitedProsperity.org, providing loan guarantees that enable poor entrepreneurs to borrow from Microfinance Institutions to build their enterprises in developing countries.

Kiva (www.kiva.org) is a website that uses Yunis’ principles to rethink the way we give to charity. In most charity situations we are just giving money for a cause we believe in and we lose any contact with how the money is being spent and whether it does any good. Kiva wants to turn charity donors into partners.

The following statistics taken from their website indicate their impressive
impact:

Total value of all loans made through Kiva: $140,222,635
Number of Kiva Users: 719,433
Number of Kiva Users who have funded a loan: 457,927
Number of countries represented by Kiva Lenders: 197
Current repayment rate (all partners): 98.16%
Average loan size (This is the average amount loaned to an individual Kiva Entrepreneur. Some loans - group loans - are divided between a group of borrowers.): $390.89
Average total amount loaned per Kiva Lender (includes reloaned funds): $195.18
Average number of loans per Kiva Lender: 5.70

Kiva partners Kiva Partners with a Microfinance Institution

Kiva partners with "existing microfinance institutions around the world (we call them Field Partners). These organizations that have expertise in microfinance and a mission to alleviate poverty facilitate Kiva loans on the ground."

You can join lending teams and aggregate your individual amount with that of team and you can decide to give to a huge variety of highly worthy entrepreneurs whose profiles are listed.

For example a group of women silk weavers in Cambodia need $2,500 to buy silk
and they still need $950 --you can make a $25 donation. Their picture is featured at the top of this blog.

"Thirteen people who live in Ampil Lech village in Takeo province make up a village bank loan group. Mrs. Eng Ly Nget is the village bank president, selected by all the members. They will use the loan for different purposes so that it can improve their businesses in the future.

Mrs. Eng Ly Nget is a weaver and her husband, Mr. Roeurn Yen, is a farmer who owns a plot of land to cultivate rice on to sell to support his family. Since her business is going well, she wants to expand. Thus to improve her family's living conditions, Mrs. Eng Ly Nget is seeking a loan to buy silk. She is the mother of three children, one of whom is a weaver, while another one is enrolled in local public school, and the youngest one is only three years old."

This is very personal giving and it is a loan--you get repaid for your donation!
"The Field Partner collects repayments from Kiva entrepreneurs as well as any interest due and lets Kiva know if a repayment was not made as scheduled. Interest rates are set by the Field Partner, and that interest is used to cover the Field Partner's operating costs. Kiva doesn't charge interest to its Field Partners and does not provide interest to lenders. Kiva also gives Field Partners the option to cover currency losses."

What it Will Take to Close the Global Achievement Gap

2010-05-25T17:57:00.001-07:00

Tony Wagner serves as Co-Director of the Change Leadership Group (CLG) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since its inception in 2000. “An initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, He also the author of The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It and presented this past week to the American Youth Policy Forum..

Wagner’s basic argument is that a global achievement gap exists so that even students attending our best schools fail to meet the expectations that leaders of large firms like Microsoft. Google and Xerox. Everyone in these firms need to communicate with passion, problem solve and collaborate at far higher and more sophisticated levels than ever before. Furthermore today’s tests can tell us almost nothing about who has those skills and who does not. What are some of the components we should look at to improve? Better tests, vastly improved teacher preparation with a greater emphasis on the clinical , more R&D that can point to specific areas concerning how to improve practice are among the key points that need to change. Where do we look for a model? No further than Finland--the highest performing educational system in the world. Wagner is just back from a trip to that country-- a nation he notes that is not entirely homogeneous--20% of the population migrated from other countries.

Finnish system is characterized by :

• Need a Masters Degree to teach
• Finland’s student teachers are better prepared and higher performing than most experienced teachers in the US
• National curriculum standards-local responsibility for implementation
• One third of all high school classes are electives

Wagner advocates—some of the following actions need to be taken:

• students’ have digital portfolios linked to teachers’ portfolios
• Recertification of teachers’ every 5 years
• A National Teachers Academy similar to the National Army, Navy and Airforce Academies—where exemplary teachers demonstrate their skills
• A greater emphasis on R&D to help understand how to teach at these higher levels that are now needed by our society and economy.

Asked what specifically we could do when NCLB is up for reauthorization this year—explore alternatives to the useless tests we now have. Finland he notes employs very few tests.

My questions are now as follows:

Do we have the leadership, money and the willingness now to reinvent both assessments so that they truly reflect the 21stcentury skills we need today

Can we improve our teacher preparation and form it along Finnish lines?

Can we find leaders like Wagner willing to clearly explain the facts to our attention challenged media, policy makers and others that even our best students are not prepared for the global workforce?

Can we all acceept that what our students need at this time is something different from what we all endured in the last century--teacher led instruction? Can we finally shift over to student centered engaged learning ?

Can we use technology as a key tool --so that all our students from the least academically motivated to the most want to come to school and don't end up as passengers on a bus they don't know why they are on?

Join iEARN's campaign to Pair Every School Globally by 2016

2010-05-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Ed Gragert is a great advocate for global communication leading to better cultural understanding. As CEO of iEARN in the US, he has tirelessly dedicated himself to the mission of assisting schools around the world enrich their curriculum through global connections--expanding the organization from a few countries in the late 1980s to one that currently "engages about 750,000 students in 38 countries with significant Muslim populations in collaborative online project work."

In a recent Huffington Post op ed he calls for the President to set a challenge to US schools to "link every school in the US with at least one other school somewhere in the world -- through virtual exchanges by 2016."

The boosts to language learning, to global awareness and 21st century collaborative and problem solving skills would be enormous as would our students' quantum growth in global knowledge and understanding.

How do we make it happen by 2016? Ed calls for a "public-private partnership "ENGAGE The World" Initiative can be created that brings together the 30+ organizations that are already linking US schools with peers internationally to create a one-stop place online through which schools, teachers and youth organization leaders can find examples and opportunities to establish cross-cultural connections and learning with the global youth community."

The effort needs to be organized through every state department of education who needs to help get the word out and to suggest ways in which the curriculum can be enhanced through such exchanges.

As I wrote in an article for E-School News on the Rise of the Globally Connected Student we don't need a new network as President Obama indicated in his Cairo speech to do this, we have the existing networks so in the President's words "a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo."

But we do need to follow through and make the leap into the future that will really begin to help this generation of students truly engage in the 21st century globally interconnected and inter-dependent world they will inherit.

Engage The World: Effective Networking for Global Awareness and Global Education

2010-05-20T10:25:00.001-07:00

Thanks for this article --lets hope it renews interest in global education using the web to authentically connect to the students across the world
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Time to Rethink Higher Ed for the 21st Century?

2010-05-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

So here are some possibly inconvenient facts for those who like to equate education success with attending a four year college. According to New York Times reports

* “Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
* “Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.”
* Of those who passed the German Abitur, the key final high school test allowing allows “some Germans to attend college for almost no tuition, 40 percent chose to go into apprenticeships in trades, accounting, sales management, and computers.
* “Students who graduated from college in 2008 with loans carried an average debt.” of $23,200 — an increase of nearly 25 percent, or $4,550, when compared with those who graduated just four years earlier”.
* An estimated “40% of college students will leave higher education without getting a degree, with 75% percent of these students leaving within their first two years of college. Freshman class attrition rates are typically greater than any other academic year and are commonly as high as 20-30%”

Something seems clearly wrong with this picture. Too many students find their way into colleges either unprepared or unmotivated for college work and because of the pressure (usually exerted by families and school counselors) find themselves in debt and cast as failures in the early twenties without anything to show for their efforts.

We need a real debate about the type of higher education that is right for the 21st century-one that looks realistically at alternatives to four year degree programs that are not well aligned with the nation’s job market. Some examples of the dysfunction are provided in the New York Times article by Professor Richard Vedder.

“It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.”

Some of the alternatives mentioned in the New York Times article include : “short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.” Others must include some on-line learning and work experience as well as university and community colleges that could design their programs to include a better balance between work experience, project based learning and mentoring opportunities organized by the colleges themselves.

20th century education was based around the notion that there were some clear credentials that once obtained would reflect the knowledge and skills necessary to be competent in the society for a lifetime. The nature and shape of 21st century realities require a starkly different approach—in the new global economy in which rapid changes in technology lead to as many as five or more career changes in a life time means—students today will be continuously learning and so that intensive investment into four years of one’s early life may not be as valuable as extending and increasing that investment over the course of a lifetime. Higher education needs to catch the same 21st century bus that schools need to jump on if they are going to successfully adapt themselves to changing realities.

The World's Great Teachers Available from Your Desktop--Now What?

2010-05-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

We appear to be entering a golden age when it now possible for free to view the best teachers and professors on line. Thanks to the wonders of You Tube and great Web 2.0 Technologywe can share the delights of what a great teacher can bring in terms of understanding of the material, ability to transmit their knowledge and what is often so very important infect their love of learning with their audience. Here are a few examples of what I mean--we will be following up with others in later posts.

The following video was referenced by the New York Times article by Katie Hafner, An Open Mind,

" At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it’s difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus’s largest lecture hall, with room for 736. She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig¬non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box’s contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, “because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?” The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands."

The implications of this are truly enormous. We are only just at the beginning here as the Open Courseware movement takes off--initiated by MIT but having initiated the movement with their desire to place some (as it turns out a quite limited set of materials on line). Now we have an extensive set of other places on the web to gather great educational materials Take a look at the directory the New York Times managed to put together.

We need a discussion of the ways we can best use these materials--in schools, college and for online learning.

Charity Reflections this Mother's Day

2010-05-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

As I was reviewing my giving for this upcoming Mother's Day, (I wanted to give something of value to celebrate the life of my own mother who passed away at the end of last year and decided on a gift that UNICEF provides for those children who do not have school supplies. ) I thought how does anyone know that their preferred charity is administratively sound--that we will be getting our money's worth? How much is their overhead? Could they be better organized if they worked together rather than pay for separate staff and facilities both domestically and in other countries?
One tool you can use is Charity Navigator--they provide vital statistics of more or less most charities. I was glad to see UNICEF was in their highly rated category with their overhead costs a modest 2.8%.

Educators might want to use this tool as they help their students to understand the increasingly important work of charities and discuss their role. Charity Navigators'
include some useful tips on giving that might be the subject of some discussions and exercises.
.

New Report Points to Need for More Urgent Action to Support At-Risk Students

2010-04-28T07:16:00.000-07:00

I attended a Brookings Institution panel today that released the Future of Children Report which contained some unsurprising findings: "Today young adults take far longer to reach economic and social maturity than their contemporaries did five or six decades ago, taking longer to leave home, attain economic independence, marry, and form families of their own. In large part, this shift is attributable to the increased importance of higher education in today’s high-skilled workforce"

Students without a high school diploma or a year of college are at increased risk of becoming part of a permanent underclass that will grow in this country as we move from the old manufacturing to a service one economy. The R word however was not used in this session--it seemed people were reluctant to mention the record unemployment that is making it hard even for top graduate students from Ivy League universities find jobs let alone students denied such opportunities. One of the most lucid panel members discussing the report was Assistant Secretary Jane Oates who now as head of the US Department of Labor's Employment and Training administration emphasizes the need for clear career pathways that include industry recognized measures such as certifications. Assistant Secretary Oates decried the fact that in the past the federal government was just interested in whether students trained could gain a low wage job--today she argued a $10.00 hour entry level job is likely to be a dead end one that will not support a family. As our already under resourced education system is buffeted by new rounds of budget cuts it seems increasingly obvious that we need to make new arrangements to support our most at-risk students in this more hostile environment. Students at much earlier stages of their careers before they make the judgment that "school is not for them" and decide to drop out need to gain career exposure, need to see that their studies in school are relevant and need to grasp how much is needed to gain a chance at the new 21st century jobs.

If we don't help prepare our most vulnerable students in this way it is likely that we will see increased deterioration in terms of our inner cities, higher crime and more social pathologies. As the report recommends we need "to design and implement effective new programs to help young people in danger of dropping out of school complete their secondary education so that they are better prepared to take the next step, whether directly into the labor force, into military or other service, or into higher education.

There was a focus on the need for more rigorous evaluations of effective programs. This seems needed but it is likely that critics of the government role will do their job of finding small flaws and use the evaluations to cut or eliminate altogether funding for otherwise worthwhile programs. Clearly no one evaluates whether jails do any good and will laugh at you if you suggested that due to their high recidivism rate we shut them down.

It is imperative that given the high unemployment rate particularly in the inner city--that we take emergency action.

Teacher Training in Crisis?

2010-04-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

Teacher education has not been in a healthy state for years. Art Levine documents in his , 2006 study, Educating School Teachers some of the key failings, "most teacher preparation programs have low admissions and graduation standards, inadequate curriculums, disconnects between academic and clinical instruction, and alumni who say they were not adequately prepared for the classroom." The report called for sweeping changes such as shutting down low performing programs but colleges have been slow to take up the call for reform so loudly sounded by the Levine report. Now comes a completely unexpected result of the inaction--New York State Board of Regents now has established a new policy enabling non-universities, such as organizations like Teach for America, to create teacher education programs, such programs would allow the Board of Regents to grant a master's degrees to teachers. I agree with Levine's recent article/blog this is a step backwards. The knowledge base and objectivity, professional expertise a university in conjunction with discipline based resources are second to none when universities are functioning at their best. However, too many universities today are focused on bottom line issues and not operating according to highes today t ideals. Instead they are too often concerned with how many students can they attract for the lowest price --using a combination of large classess and relying on adjunct faculty. For these universities New York State Board of Regents' action should be a wake up call.

How is this related to global education--here is Art Levine's perspective,
"both universities and schools are in the midst of adapting to dramatic global change. As a consequence of demographic, economic, and technological shifts, universities and schools — like so many of our social institutions, including government, health care, the media, and financial institutions — appear broken because they were built for a different time. All of them need to be repaired, through no fault of their own."

In other words the current dysfunction is a result of global changes that have swept through other areas of society. I partially agree with that assessment but it would seem that some universities need to spend less on new buildings, administrator salaries and huge marketing budgets and more on the slow work of investing in needed reforms. This is particularly the case in the distance education world where the lure of reducing costs through large sized classes has beeen enormously tempting. An outside partner maybe needed to make dramatic reform really happen.Art Levine desribes a few instances (with the help of the Woodrow Wilson Foundtion) that are starting to yield impressive results, "We have seen universities move from a mostly on-campus program to a truly clinical program in which aspiring teachers spend most of their time in K-12 schools observing master teachers, teaching under supervision, and melding theory and practice. We have seen universities break down the liberal arts/education divide and engage discipline-specific arts and sciences professors in mentoring novice teachers."

So what is needed now is a larger discussion about how really well thought through change can occur, improvements and innovations that benefit teacher of education students and help them truly become 21st century globally aware professionals so they can assist their students thrive in the rapidly changing world they will inherit. Part of the solution will be to assist our students take full advantage of the revolutionary ways technology can be used to enable vital links between clinical practice, theory and reflection. Now universities must feel the heat and respond in ways that make us believe that they can indeed grow to be even more relevant to the new century as they were undoubtedly in the last one.

Is Adaptive Testing the Key Technology for 21st century education?

2010-04-22T17:24:00.000-07:00

Many agree that one of the keys to improving education in the 21st century will be if we can harness the potential offered by technology to personalize learning. Paul E Peterson agrees wholeheartedly in his “Finding the Student’s ‘Price Point’” op ed column in Education Week. If this happens then Howard Gardner can justly claim a large degree of credit. Gardner has made the point for example that,

“So long as we insist on teaching all students the same subjects in the same way, progress will be incremental. But now for the first time it is possible to individualize education—to teach each person what he or she needs and wants to know in ways that are most comfortable and most efficient.”

A critical tool in advancing this cause according to Paul E Peterson will be adaptive assessment, which “can quickly identify a student’s reading, math, and science skills, and the curriculum can then be adapted to the student’s performance level.”

One example of the way adaptive testing has made a difference is New York City’s “School of One” tried the idea out last summer to great applause—Time magazine named it one of the top 50 inventions of the year. The program is now in operation in three middle schools.

The Florida Virtual School is now among the leading exponents of adaptive testing. It has helped that any high school in Florida has the “option of taking a course online, from the Florida Virtual School or in the classroom of the local high school. Success in either setting is recorded on the high school transcript and counts toward a diploma. State funding goes to the school from which the student took the course.”

Peterson is such a fan of adaptive testing that he would like to see the Obama adminstration get solidly behind it even to the point of using the $650 million Investing in Innovation ( 13 ) program to underwrite the approach.

We need more research on this but it is a good bet that this innovation will transform the way schools operate more than any other single innovation.

Cyber-Learning: About E-learning...

2010-04-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

Cyber-Learning: About E-learning...
wwww.cyberlearning.org

First Signs that the i-Pad is Beginning to Fuel the E-Textbook Revolution

2010-04-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

Well it has happened. Change is occuring in a record fast fashion. E-books will soon be replacing textbooks and i-Pads may soon replace lap tops. Evidence for all this is drawn from a recent report from Minnesota, the consolidated school in Winthrop to be exact plans to put an i-Pad into the hands of every student. The school board recently approved $265,000 that purchased 230 iPads, Additionally, it will upgrade all school buildings with Wi-Fi and provide technical training for everyone starting next year–

“The plan is that every student at GFW high school gets an iPad to use,” said Bertrang. “Then we’re going to have a team of teachers and students get together to figure out the how-to part… This (meaning an i-Pad) probably weighs one to two pounds,” said high school junior Spencer Kruggel, holding an iPad. “And this is 20 to 30 pounds,” he said, as he lifted his backpack.”

Apple is planning to make Winthrop a model i-Pad school and if things go right it will form the way for the nation. According to reports, “more than 450,000 iPads have been sold since the release date a few weekends ago. The average owner of the iPad also owns an iPhone or iPod touch already. The biggest consumers currently are males ages 35-44 and have a household income of over $100,000.” As the following blog speculates “once publishers of textbooks for colleges and universities start ramping up their production we will see a majority shift of the ages come down to more college aged users as schools figure out how to adopt this new learning tool.”

New Report: An Imperative for Schools to Transform?

2010-04-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, 2010 Horizon Report: K-12, represents an ongoing research effort established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe." The report happens to be one of the more insightful that I have read recently. The reports' parameters since 2002 have been clearly set out –they are to introduce “six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use in the educational community within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years." The report is long and thoughtful and I urge everyone to read it but I wanted to point out two trends in particular that stand out for me:

i) There is increasing interest in just-in-time, alternate, or non-formal avenues of education, such as online learning, mentoring, and independent study. Of the school as the seat of educational practice is changing as learners avail themselves of learning opportunities from other sources. There is a tremendous opportunity for schools to work hand-in-hand with alternate sources, to examine traditional approaches, and to reevaluate the content and experiences they are able to offer.

ii) The way we think of learning environments is changing. Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, the “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools.

The gist of both findings is that some if not all the institutional walls separating schools from the outside world are going to have to be removed. We need discussions about what good partnerships that might be offered--and how they might connect. One promising area is use of online mentoring that might be provided by non profits and others who have particular expertise where schools need help--particularly math and IT literacy. There is no reason why adults who are properly trained and cleared to work with young people online cannot be a great help in this area--providing the kind of close one on one attention that student require these days. The report helps us to re-conceive schools as part of learning communities that include the school, library, home and community centers as well as places such as museums, gardens, colleges, workplaces and play spaces...It seems to suggest that schools need to be the places where learners need to feel empowered to learn and then be given the resources and training to go out and work with and engage with the community at large. This seems to move us to an Ivan Ilyich de-schooling society idea--which during the 70s was viewed as quite a radical concept but today perhaps less so.

After all many schools arrange virtual field trips for their students and many more computers are available in the community for students to connect to-we also have virtual schools and home schooling all of which have expanded our notions of what schools are and can become . The report points out that many policy makers and educators believe that deep reform is needed, but at the same time, there is little agreement as to what a new model of education might look like.

But while schools are thinking about the problems of transforming the system the changes might overwhelm them. The report seems to offer a veiled warning to schools by asking them to acknowledge the fact that today “learners have increasing opportunities to take their education into their own hands, and options like informal education, online education, and home-based earning are attracting students away from traditional educational settings. If the system is to remain relevant it must adapt, but major change comes hard in education.” That is why some careful piloting and experimentation with new models of 21st century learning makes sense at this stage. We should all be actively involved in this process of working with the new technologies and finding new opportunities to find transformative learning commensurate for our times. This maybe somewhat vague --but understandably so since we are only at the beginning of understanding what those 'alternate sources' might be.

If Statistics are Not Your Bag--This TED talk Invites you to Think Again

2010-04-13T16:46:00.001-07:00

If you don't think statistics can be powerful ways to learn and teach then think again after you see this dynamite TED talk and get to know Hans Rosling who makes sensational animations that allow you to see trends that reveal global realities is startlingly new ways. The kind of data that we use in most classrooms is outdated and static --the real purpose of using statistics seems to me to grasp deeper understandings of underlying invisible trends.
Rosling will change the way you view the massive amounts of hidden data that take effort to find but once you understand its true power you will be calling for more transparency and openess in use of public data.

Cell phones versus i-Pads: Problems looking for Solutions?

2010-04-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

In a thought provoking column in this Sunday’s New York Times, The Triumph of the Ordinary Cellphone, Anand Giridharadas, discusses whether the US has thought about high tech correctly when it comes to meeting the needs of a majority of the world’s citizens not jus the most affluent.

Americans went gaga last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone. “Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message; borrowing and lending money and receiving salaries on cellphones; employing their phones variously as flashlights, televisions and radios.”

Giridharadas makes a number of key points:

In developing countries the innovative ideas come from perfecting the cell phone to do more useful things for ordinary people–for example:

•Two organizations — Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories in Israel — offer job-hunting services via text message. Souktel allows users without Internet access or fancy phones to register by sending a series of text messages with information about themselves. A user who texts in “match me” will receive a listing of suitable jobs, including phone numbers to dial.
•In Africa, the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. Plastic cards have become the reigning instruments of payment in the West, but projects like PesaPal and M-Pesa in Kenya are working to make the cellphone the hub of personal finance. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone.
Innovative companies are also able to build business models that allow larger numbers of people to share in the innovations while still preserving favorable profit margins:

In India, Reliance Communications sells handsets for less than $25, with 1-cent-a-minute phone calls across India and 1-cent text messages and no monthly charge — while earning fat profits. Compare that with iPad buyers in the United States, who pay $499 for the basic version, who might also have a $1,000-plus computer and a $100-plus smartphone, and who could pay $100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.

Has the US taken the wrong road when it comes to truly developing the next generation of technology’s potential? ‘Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, thinks so: “There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.”

Does this type of backwards thinking also apply in education? I think so. Let’s just take one example, we have numerous free courses on the world wide web and amazing amount of other educational resources that are looking for users. But rather than figuring out whether these thousands if not millions of resources produced by organizations like NASA, the Library of Congress and Museums around the world have value and for whom – for profit companies continue to sell to schools entire courses that arguably keep reinventing the wheel. We are so busy innovating all the time we dont get a chance to stop often enough concerning whom are we innovating for and with what result. The result shiny new objects and software with brightly colored interactive features owned by fewer and fewer people, rather than less shiny and more useful objects and software owned by more people. You choose.